Pivot3 closes $12 million round

AUSTIN, Texas—Storage provider Pivot3 on August 7 closed a $12 million funding round which will be used for “product development, sales and marketing," Pivot3 CEO Ron Nash told Security Systems News.

The round was led by S3 Ventures, a new investor in the company. S3 Ventures managing director Brian R. Smith has joined the Pivot3 board. Also participating in the round were InterWest Partners and Mesirow Financial.

Pivot3 also hired Mike Dansby as VP and CFO.

Since Nash took over as CEO in November 2013, Pivot3 has “doubled in size on a quarterly basis,” he said.

One initiative Nash worked on is speeding up the delivery of products. “Three weeks is the standard best practice delivery time and we were double or triple that,” Nash said. Pivot3 made some internal changes and “dramatically shortened the [delivery time] down to three weeks.”

The first test was July. “We shipped more than $5 million in products. That's a good rate and it shows that we can ship quite heavily,” Nash said.

Nash is excited about Pivot3 debuting an update of its vSTAC operating system 6.5. and its Virtual Security Console, which Pivot3 says “allows users to flexibly deliver secure, centralized video management capabilities at any time and any place without deploying additional expensive, graphics-enabled PCs.”

Nash said it “solves a real problem in security” where users want to access video remotely. What's different about this solution, Nash said, is that it “works seamlessly across a variety of devices.”

Pivot3 now describes itself as a supplier of "hyper-converged infrastructure." Asked about this new description, Nash said it's "just means a set of hardware or software that runs multiple functions on the same appllance." That's what Pivot3 has always been, he said. The IT term is being used more often now, so Pivot3 decided to use it as well, he explained.

Pivot3 does not to release revenue figures; that's something they'll do when they get closer to an IPO, Nash said. When will that be? Nash wouldn't name any dates, it depends on how fast Pivot3 grows, but he added, “with the $12 million, we're going to grow faster.”