Pensando Systems Emerges with $145M Series C

Pensando Systems, the company pioneering the new edge services model of enterprise and cloud computing, today announced that Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners led a Series C round to raise up to $145 million in funding. This will bring the total amount raised to $278 million after an earlier founder-led series A round of $71 million, and a customer-led series B round of $62 million. The company will use the new funding to accelerate engineering, operations, and go-to-market activities.

Pensando also announced that Mark Potter, chief technology officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Barry Eggers, a partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, joined the board of directors, with John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures, leading as chairman.

"It gives me great pleasure to welcome two new members to the Pensando board," said John Chambers, Chairman of the Pensando Board of Directors. "I look forward to working closely with Mark and Barry as we focus on accelerating our operations and go-to-market activities."

"Today's rapidly transforming, hyper-connected world requires enterprises to operate with even greater flexibility and choices than ever before," said Mark Potter, CTO of HPE and director of Hewlett Packard Labs. "HPE's expanding relationship with Pensando Systems stems from our shared understanding of enterprises and the cloud. We are proud to announce our investment and solution partnership with Pensando and will continue to drive solutions that anticipate our customers' needs together."

"As a leader in enterprise investing, we are excited to partner with the world class team at Pensando, who have demonstrated the ability to repeatedly redefine how enterprise networks are built," said Barry Eggers, Founding Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Pensando also unveiled its flagship software-defined edge services platform today. The Pensando platform delivers highly programmable software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage, and security services wherever data is located. This unique capability means that cloud providers can now gain a technological advantage over the current market leader, Amazon Web Services Nitro, delivering 5-9x improvements in productivity, performance, and scale when compared to current architectures with no risk of lock-in.

In addition, existing Fortune 500 customers including Goldman Sachs (also a Pensando investor) report that enterprises can transform their current infrastructure into a cloud-like environment, eliminating multiple legacy appliances and improving operational simplicity and security while at the same time delivering never before seen performance, scale, and observability.

Incorporated less than three years ago Pensando has stealthily built a tier one ecosystem of customers, investors, and partners including HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp, and Equinix.

"Goldman Sachs is significantly simplifying our data center architecture and reducing expenses with Pensando," said Joshua Matheus, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. "Pensando allows us to secure our east-west data center traffic while ensuring compliance, and at the same time, with improved telemetry, we reduce our time-to-problem resolution from hours to minutes."

Scale-Out Services for A Scale-Out World

5G, IoT, AI and massive application growth are transforming the way modern enterprises operate, from manufacturing to warehouses and logistics to delivering services to end users. By 2025 upwards of 75% of enterprise data will be created and processed at the edge, according to Gartner, creating significant challenges for existing infrastructure. This change driving modern infrastructure to a scale-out approach will also require scale-out services to match.

Pensando is the first secure, programmable, edge-accelerated platform that directly addresses the generational shift occurring as data pushes to the edge of the cloud. The foundation of the Pensando platform is a custom programmable processor optimized to execute a software stack delivering cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services wherever data is located, all managed via the Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller.

Cloud providers: With Pensando, public cloud providers are armed with a dynamic infrastructure that not only competes with the leading hyperscalers – such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) but delivers a multi-generational technological lead over them
Enterprise datacenter customers: Enterprises can now transform their current infrastructure into a cloud-like environment that seamlessly and securely extends to the public cloud
Service providers: Pensando gives service providers the ability to rapidly innovate and securely deploy new services at hyperscale
"In less than 3 years we've assembled a best in class engineering team that are experts in building systems for the cloud, compute, networking, storage and security markets" said Prem Jain, CEO of Pensando Systems. "As a customer and partner first company we are focused on accelerating all aspects of our business as we go to market with a great ecosystem and a breakthrough platform."

"Ongoing participation from early stage strategic investors and customers is a valuable performance metric for any growing business," said Randy Pond, Pensando CFO. "I'm very pleased that this round also brought us two great new customer investors and a leading VC firm in HPE, Equinix and Lightspeed Venture Partners. We are now extremely well positioned to ramp our end-to-end operations, engineering and go-to-market activities for the next generation of the cloud."

For more information or to schedule a demo, please visit www.pensando.io

About Pensando Systems
Founded in 2017, Pensando Systems is pioneering distributed computing designed for the New Edge, powering software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services to transform existing architectures into the secure, ultra-fast environments demanded by next generation applications. The Pensando platform, a first of its kind, was developed in collaboration with the world's largest cloud, enterprise, storage, and telecommunications leaders and is supported by partnerships and investments with HPE, NetApp, Equinix, and multiple Fortune 500 customers. Pensando is led by Silicon Valley's legendary "MPLS" team – Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond – who have an unmatched track record of disruptive innovation having already built 8 $Bn/Year businesses across storage, switching, routing, wireless, voice/video/data, & software-defined networking. The company is backed by investors that include Goldman Sachs and JC2 Ventures. For more information, please visit www.pensando.io.