Qumulo

Qumulo was founded in March 2012 by Neal Fachan, Peter Godman, and Aaron Passey. They all previously worked at Isilon, a storage platform that was acquired by EMC.[1][2] Several of Qumulo's key employees are also former Isilon employees.[3][4][5]

The company received $2.3-million seed funding from investment company Valhalla Partners.[6][7] In November 2012, it secured an additional $24.5 million from a Series A round led by Highland Capital Partners.[2][7] By the end of its first year, the company had raised a total of $26.8 million while releasing few details about its possible product offering.[1][2]

After an 18-month development period in 2013–2014, Qumulo began selling its products in August 2014.[8][9] Six months after its product release, the company announced completion of a $40-million funding series led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.[5][8] Before entering the development period, Qumulo employed 18 people[2][7] which increased to 90 by February 2015[8][4] and to 150 employees in January 2016.[10]

The company remained secretive about its product offering until March 2015,[11] when it finally offered specific details of its software, describing it as a "data aware" storage system.[9] This was followed by a $32.5-million funding series in June 2016 adding new investor Allen & Company.[12][13] However, the company's share price had dropped by more than 35% when compared to previous rounds and the funds generated were below the company's expectations.[14]

In November 2016, Qumulo hired Bill Richter to succeed Godman as CEO.[12][15] Godman continued as CTO until the end of 2018.[16] Qumulo raised $30 million additional funds in April 2017 and $93 million in June 2018, bringing it total funding to $230 million.[17][18] In January 2019, the company opened offices in Vancouver, Canada.[19] It employs approximately 220 people as of April 2019.[20] Citing economic conditions and getting the company to profitability, on June 29, 2022 Qumulo laid off 80 employees, approximately 19% of its workforce.[21] Aaron Passey, who helped launch Qumulo back in 2012, returned to the Seattle-based data management company in 2022.[22]

Qumulo develops storage software for file-based data.[3][4][9] The file system software can be deployed with on-premise data centers on Qumulo's network-attached storage hardware, as well as on Hewlett Packard Enterprise Apollo and Dell PowerEdge R740xd platforms.[23][24] It can also be used on the cloud storage platforms Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform.[25][26]

In September 2018, the firm announced an update to its software adding machine learning-powered pre-fetch to anticipate which files the user will most likely access next. The software preemptively caches files identified by analyzing user behavior and patterns in file access.[27][28]

• Official website