Deals: Big-Data Startup Levyx Raises $5.4M
Levyx Inc. raised $5.4 million for high-powered storage and management software that the company said cuts infrastructure costs for big-data applications.
The Series A round was led by OCA Ventures out of Chicago. Amino Capital (formerly zPark Venture), Sumavision USA Corp. and unnamed tech executives also participated in the round.
Levyx co-founder and Chief Executive Reza Sadri said the startup is bridging the gap between high-performance big-data software and the commodity hardware used in data centers, letting users fully exploit both.
By taking advantage of parallelism in processors, solid state drives and other new technologies, he said, “you can have hundreds of CPU cores in our system. Our software can scale across all of them in a single system, so you can achieve things you’d usually achieve using tens or hundreds of servers.”
Levyx also has a data-indexing technology that plugs into Apache Spark, a popular open-source project, although it is not limited to Spark. “What Linux was to the operating system, Spark is becoming to big data,” Mr. Sadri said. “It’s the universal platform that everyone is moving applications to.”
Levyx started in 2013 and has been working with a customer to perfect its technology, which is useful for cybersecurity, financial applications, Internet of Things, data center management and other areas that need to process large amounts of data very quickly, Mr. Sadri said.
He compared big-data processing with the “mainframes of 50 years ago, which were expensive and difficult to manage and accessible to a handful of large companies. Processing large data sets is exactly like that right now.”
Although Series A rounds are getting harder to raise, Levyx raised its funding in a little over a quarter because investors are interested in big-data technology, according to Chief Operating Officer Luis Morales.
The funding closed in March and takes total funding in Levyx to $6.4 million. Levyx is based in Palo Alto, Calif., and Irvine, Calif.
Corrections & Amplifications:
Luis Morales is chief operating officer of Levyx. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated he is chief marketing officer. (April 28, 2016)
First appeared at WSJ VC
