Tegile raises $35 million for enterprise hybrid storage

Tegile Systems, a U.S. company that makes hybrid storage arrays for virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, announced this morning that it has raised $35 million from investors.

The Series C funding round included Meritech Capital Partners, August Capital, Western Digital and SanDisk.

The money will be used to shore up Tegile's sales and customer support teams in North America and Europe, the company says. It will also be used for product and technology development.

In a crowded field, the California startup distinguishes itself with money: it's the only firm in the SSD/hybrid storage space to take in more revenue than financing. That either shows the company's confidence in its ability to stand on its own feet, or reveals lackluster revenue growth.

Hopefully it's the former. Tegile says sales of its products, which include the Zebi line of enterprise hard and solid state drives offered through Western Digital, now double every quarter. (Indeed, the companies have engaged in joint technology development for server virtualization, VDI, database hosting and file services.) Tegile's hybrid storage arrays stake out the middle ground between the high performance of a conventional solid state drive and the value of a conventional hard disk drive.

Tegile counts more than 300 customers. Meritech, a late-stage venture capital company known for investments in Cloudera and Fusion-io, wants the company to experience "hyper growth." We'll see what happens.