Pivot3 gets $45 million

AUSTIN, Texas—Video analytics is an area of interest for video surveillance storage provider Pivot3, which received a $45 million equity and bank financing on Feb. 24.

Most of the funding will be used for "market facing areas" to "drive the business and get it to profitability," Pivot3 CEO Ron Nash told Security Systems News. But, Pivot3 is also interested in video analytics. While major video analytics companies such as Object Video have been purchased, and other analytic companies have gone out of business, Nash said there are still hundreds of small start-up video analytics companies out there.

"We talk to and work with analytic companies [and are exploring] how, on a technology basis, our system can make the job easier. ... We will be a leader in that," Nash said. Pivot3 "has some ideas" about how to do that although it has not made any product announcements yet, he said.

This year, Pivot3 began describing itself as a supplier of "hyper-converged infrastructure," an IT term which means "a set of hardware or software that runs multiple functions on the same appliance."

Pivot3's business plan is to "more than double the growth rate in video surveillance from what we experienced in 13-14," Nash said. The big push with the new funding, however, will be with data centers.

"When we invented our product a long time ago and started selling what we now call hyper-converged infrastruture, we checked in to see if data centers were interested," Nash said. They were not. "Where it made a magnificent difference [early on and continues today] is with video surveillance because video surveillance has really tough challenges that even data centers didn't have ... [such as the peak load that's possible] if there's a fire and every camera turns on. We handle that massive load very well," he explained.

Data centers are now interested in what Pivot3 has to offer, Nash said. While he expects much of Pivot3's growth to come from data centers, "surveillance is still our market, we're just adding on new markets." The "new features and functions that we develop [for data centers] will mean something [for video surveillance applications] as well," he said.

The $45 million investment included a new investor, Argonaut Private Equity, which manages more than $5.5 billion. It was founded by George Kaiser, a well-known investor and philanthropist. Argonaut joined S3 Investors (a new investor as of last August), InterWest Partners, Mesirow Financial Private Equity and the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosaid investment fund in this deal.

Argonaut managing director Steve Mitchell will join the Pivot3 board of directors.