Company launched by storage industry veterans 

PITTSBURGH, Sept. 14 - [PR2WEB] -- Avere Systems, a startup company focused on delivering Demand-Driven Storage solutions, announced it has secured $15 million in Series A funding from Menlo Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Avere is pioneering the use of multiple storage media in a new scalable architecture that provides enterprise storage customers with breakthrough reductions in cost, space and power.

Avere founders were members of the visionary team that created Spinnaker Networks, an innovator in scalable grid storage solutions, acquired by NetApp, Inc. in 2004 for $300 million. Avere's founder and CEO Ron Bianchini, most recently Senior Vice President, Scalable Systems at NetApp and CEO of Spinnaker Networks, reunited with CTO Michael Kazar and VP of Engineering Daniel Nydick to form Avere in January 2008. Joining these three to round out the management team are: CFO John Dean, another Spinnaker alumni; VP Sales Brian Gladden, storage veteran and former NetApp colleague; and VP Marketing Rebecca Thompson.

"In the current economy, the bar on new investments is extremely high," said Menlo Venture's Managing Director John Jarve. "It is with great delight that we rejoin forces to help build Avere. We believe it has the right team, the right technology and the right market focus."

"In addition to a track record of building innovative companies, the management team's history of success in working together creates camaraderie around the Avere facility," said Bianchini. "Our efforts this time around are different in that we're older, wiser and more battle scarred, but we're still focused on our goal to bring game-changing storage solutions to the enterprise."

"Norwest Venture Partners was pleased to support Spinnaker Networks from its seed stage through a successful acquisition, and we look forward to working with Ron and his team once again," said Matthew Howard, General Partner. "We have worked with some of the leading entrepreneurs and technologists in the storage industry, and there is no question that Avere is well positioned to lead a new storage revolution within the enterprise data center."

Jarve and Howard both serve on Avere's board of directors.

Avere Systems will be unveiling its first products in the fall of 2009.

About Menlo Ventures

Menlo Ventures provides long-term capital and management support to early-stage and emerging-growth companies. Menlo is one of the Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital partnerships, and has organized and managed ten venture funds since its inception in 1976. With over $4 billion under management, and a team with over two hundred years of collective experience in technology, marketing, sales and general management, Menlo Ventures has the resources to support the most ambitious of projects. www.menloventures.com.

About Norwest Venture Partners

Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a global, multi-stage investment firm that manages more than $2.5 billion in capital out of its offices in Palo Alto, California, Mumbai and Bangalore, India and Herzeli, Israel. NVP makes early to late stage venture and growth equity investment in U.S. and global companies across a wide range of sectors including: information technology, business services, financial services, consumer and infrastructure. www.nvp.com.

About Avere Systems

Avere Systems was founded in 2008 by a team of seasoned storage visionaries and experts to develop NAS solutions that will allow enterprises to scale storage network performance independently of capacity - driving up performance while driving down cost. This single-minded goal became the guiding philosophy behind the development of the architecture that has produced Avere's Demand-Driven Storage products, coming to market in the fall of 2009. Additional information is available at www.averesystems.com and you can follow the company on Twitter.com/averesystems.

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