Backers fling cash at Gridstore for Hyper-V hyperconverged development

Gridstore, the Hyper-V-focused hyper-converged appliance startup, has snagged a $19m funding C-round.

It also has a new chairman of the board and director plus three execs to help it push ahead.

The funding comes after an $11m B-round in 2013 and comes from Atlantic Bridge Capital along with current investors: Acero Capital, GGV Capital, and ONSET Ventures. Total funding is now $34m.

The cash will be used to expand its international geographic coverage, partner recruitment programmes, domestic and international sales teams as well as increasing engineering and product development initiatives.

Nariman Teymourian is the new chairman of the board and was an SVP and general manager at HP until October last year. He has been a founder and/or CEO of five startups acquired by Lockheed, BCG, Delta-Dental, Gale Technologies and Dell. The 18-month HP gig stands out on his CV as atypical.

Geoff Barrall was the chairman but he's now fully occupied at Imation with Nexsan and Connected Data.

Incoming director Kevin Dillon is a general partner at lead investor Atlantic Bridge Capital, so no surprise there.

The new execs are:

• James Thomason, chief strategy officer, ex-CTO for Dell's Cloud Marketplace, coming from Gale Technologies
• Phillip Lavery, VP sales for the Americas, with stints as general manager of Microsoft Federal, and director of Microsoft Enterprise Partner organisation on his CV
• Kevin Rains, chief financial officer, who has been director of Operations with Dell for its ESG (Enterprise Software Group) division.

CEO George Symons is optimistic about Gridstore's prospects this year, and why not? Gridstore is riding the HCIA wave and is the only HCIA startup waving the Hyper-V flag as its USP. With Teymourian chairing the board an acquisition-led exit for the VCS must be on the table. ®