All-flash storage startup Kaminario raises $75M led by private equity firm Waterwood Group, bringing its total raised to $218M
Ron Miller / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Kaminario's $75M round lands two years into an all-flash funding wave: Tegile pulled in a $70M Series D in May 2015 and Tintri followed with $125M that August, as venture money chased the shift from hybrid disk arrays to all-flash. What distinguishes this round is the source — private equity firm Waterwood Group leading, rather than the venture syndicates behind the 2015 cohort.
That PE lead matters because it signals where the category sits on its maturity curve: with $218M total raised, Kaminario is no longer a seed-stage bet but a scaling contender, and the later trajectory of peers bears this out — Cohesity went on to raise a $250M Series E at a $2.5B valuation while VAST Data drew $100M from Siemens — showing storage winners now need nine-figure war chests.
First-order effects
- Kaminario gains fresh capital to scale its all-flash array business against both legacy storage vendors and the 2015-funded cohort of Tegile and Tintri, without the dilution or exit-pressure dynamics of a venture-led round.
Second-order effects
- Rivals still on venture timelines — Tintri and Tegile among them — face pressure to either raise comparably large rounds or become acquisition targets, since competing on flash performance requires sustained R&D spend their smaller treasuries strain to match.
Third-order effects
- If PE firms keep leading storage rounds, the sector consolidates around a handful of deeply capitalized players, with private equity effectively arbitraging the gap between venture patience and public-market expectations for infrastructure companies.
The trend: Enterprise storage funding is migrating from venture-backed hybrid-array startups toward large growth-equity rounds for all-flash specialists, concentrating the category around fewer, better-capitalized contenders.