Pivot3 gets $23m, new investor

AUSTIN, Texas—Pivot3 on Feb. 8 closed on a $23 million round of new equity funding, which brings total investment in the unified storage and compute company to $100 million since the company was founded in 2003.

The round was led by a new investor, Samsung Ventures, and included all existing investors: Focus Ventures, InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial, Northleaf Capital Partners and Silver Creek Ventures.

Lee Caswell of Pivot3 said this round of funding shows that PIvot3 “is completely committed to the surveillance space.”

Richard Bravman, Pivot3 CEO, said in a prepared statement, “We will accelerate the global roll-out of our innovative VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure initiative and introduce new solid state solutions and partner programs to the video surveillance market.”

Pivot3 made two other announcements: That it appointed Mark Modica to the newly created position of VP of business development, Video Surveillance; and that it entered into a commercial partnership with Samsung Techwin, “a global provider of Security Solutions, a sector that directly leverages Pivot3's market-leading position and focus in converged compute / storage solutions for video surveillance.”

In a prepared statement, Brian Kang, managing director of Samsung Ventures America added, “We chose to invest in Pivot3 because we see them as a leading player in a large and rapidly growing space of strategic importance to our business. The commercial partnership with our Techwin affiliate yields an important second dimension of mutual opportunity for the companies.”

Caswell said: “We're helping a set of integrators and resellers [get involved in] large scale deals where only proprietary players [previously have had a foothold]."

“There's more margin opportunity [and we can] provide more engineering integration and that's where the value is moving, as opposed to just going south into the NVR replacement market,” Caswell added.