Next-Gen Data Center Vendor Fungible Raises $200M In Funding

Company plans to use new financing to accelerate development of its data processing unit technology.

Fungible, a developer of next-generation data center technology, has raised an impressive $200 million in a Series C round of funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund.

The company plans to use the additional capital to accelerate development of its next-generation data center infrastructure technology and to ramp up its sales and marketing efforts.

Fungible is developing data processing unit (DPU) technology, a new generation of processors that the company says can better execute data-centric workloads and expects to be a critical component of next-generation data centers built on composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI). Fungible is projecting CDI to be the next wave of data center design after hyper-converged infrastructure.

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"Our vision is to provide such dramatic improvements to the performance, reliability and economics of data centers that applications previously unimaginable become possible," said Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder and CEO of Fungible, in a statement. "Every significant advancement in technology is ultimately enabled by a step-function improvement in one of its fundamental building blocks; the Fungible Data Processing Unit is a new essential building block that represents just such a step-function improvement."

The idea behind CDI is that it doesn't rely on fixed configurations of compute and storage elements inside each system “box,” freeing data centers from the physical limitations of servers. Fungible's DPUs and related software will be part of the disaggregated hardware and composer software that will be needed to make CDI a reality.

Market researcher International Data Corp. is forecasting that the CDI market will grow at a five-year CAGR of more than 58 percent, reaching nearly $3.4 billion in 2022. But that will still be just a small part of the $120 billion-plus data center infrastructure market.

Fungible, based in Santa Clara, Calif., was founded in 2015 by Sindhu and Bertrand Serlet. Sindhu previously founded Juniper Networks and served as the company's CEO and CTO. Serlet founded storage startup Upthere and before that was senior vice president of software engineering at Apple.

Fungible has now raised more than $300 million in capital from Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Redline Capital and Walden Riverwood Ventures, some of whom participated in the most recent financing round with SoftBank and Norwest Venture Partners, another new investor.