Violin Memory Reaches Market Value of $440 Million With Latest $40 Million Series C Funding

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 7, 2011) - Violin Memory, Inc., provider of the world's fastest and most scalable Memory Arrays, today announced a $40 Million Series C funding round which includes existing strategic investors and new cross-over public market investors. This comes just months after the company raised $35 Million in Series B funding. Significant market momentum including Fusion-IO's pending IPO, EMC's plan to accelerate flash storage adoption and Oracle's TPC-C flash based world record, pave the way for Violin to capture leadership and marketshare in this multi-billion dollar opportunity.

"Our new capital will allow us to speed up product development and global expansion in Europe and Asia to surpass $100 million in revenue this year, the first step in building a billion dollar company," said Don Basile, current CEO of Violin Memory and former chairman and CEO of Fusion-io. "This pace of revenue growth will continue to make Violin the fastest growing storage company in the last decade."

According to Brian Marshall, senior analyst at Gleacher & Company, "Successful investing in the technology sector is largely dependent on identifying and providing solutions to problems that exist in secular growth markets. Led by a strong management team, we believe Violin possesses the key attributes required for building a scalable business model. Today's financing announcement is another step in the right direction to driving material revenue growth."

The latest multi-million dollar investments from several of the largest public companies in the computer industry (both announced and unannounced) puts the company in the perfect position to deliver flash Memory Arrays to the world's leading enterprises. Widespread adoption of the company's technology in the data center is being driven by Big Data, Mobile 4G, Social Commerce and Cloud Computing.

Gartner states, "The enterprise storage industry is witnessing a 100 year flood of innovation and deluge of new vendors. Companies that are able to provide superior enterprise solid-state solutions combined with differentiated software will be best positioned to exploit the $4.2 billion market opportunity in 2015."*

Violin's Memory Arrays are the most advanced silicon storage systems combining software, Toshiba NAND Flash, DRAM and distributed processing to form a solution that can address a full range of enterprise architectures including network attached storage (NAS), local clusters and low latency, scalable QFabric data centers from Juniper Networks, a Violin investor. This advanced technology was recently used by Hewlett-Packard (HP) to set new TPC-E and TPC-C industry leading server benchmarks, and is transforming the data center for companies like AOL, Perforce and Microsoft.

Violin was recently named a Gartner "Cool Vendor" for storage technologies and one of Silicon Valley's hottest companies by Lead411. Furthermore, the company won two SPIFFY awards and was recognized as one of Storage Newsletter's "15 Most Promising Startups."

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*Sources: Gartner, "Marketing Essentials: How to Use Application Workloads to Drive Go-to-Market Plans for Enterprise-Grade Solid-State Drives,"December 2010; "Cool Vendors in Storage Technologies, 2011,"April 2011.

About Violin Memory, Inc.
Violin Memory is pioneering the future of Flash memory in the enterprise data center with Memory Arrays that accelerate business critical applications and enable enterprises to virtualize and optimize their IT infrastructures. Specifically designed for sustained performance with high reliability, Violin's Memory Arrays scale to hundreds of terabytes and millions of IOPS with low, spike-free latency. Founded in 2005, Violin Memory is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information about Violin Memory products, visit www.vmem.com.