Skyera, interview with CEO Rado Danilak
Date: 16 April 2014
Skyera CrunchBase Profile
I had a great chat today with Rado Danilak, the founder and CEO of Skyera. The company has been greatly introduced by Chris Mellor in August of last year. They certainly had my interest then with their very low $2 dollar per GB of Flash storage and 500 TB per 1 U unit / 21 PB per rack storage density.
These specs are so good, they could arouse suspicion. At least until you realize that Rado is not only the founder of Sandforce but also the engineer behind the best chipsets ever at NVIDIA.
I was given a few scoops today that reveal how well Skyera is doing. Today, Rado told me that in fiscal year 2012, before the 51.6 million in funding, Skyera turned a healthy revenue of $3,6 million.
The revenue numbers for 2013 he could not give yet, but will reflect strong growth.
The relevance of these numbers is that Skyera has been able to create much more revenue, much earlier, than competitors like Pure Storage and Violin Memory.
In addition to these impressive figures, Rado also announced that they will be shipping their product in volume within two weeks from now (May 2014).
Skyera seems to set itself apart both in engineering power and in healthy financials, I look forward to seeing what this company will do.
Later this week I will update a full article on the interview I did with Rado. So tune in later!
For more CEO interviews, check out my CEO series here.
Have been telling people for years the storage market is due for a new major player… Nice to see who it is. -Marc
I am surprised to know that $3.6 million is considered a good number for company like Skyera with investment greater than 100 million.
I am very skeptical about future of flash only SAN players. For a company like Skyera which focuses on low cost per GB instead of technological innovation, the future is questionable. If they sale too cheap, their profit margins become very low or negative even if their revenue climbs
In addition, the emergence of hyper-convergence vendors like Nutanix will result in loss of market for SSD SAN.
Thanks for your comment – the significance of the $3.6 Million revenue is that this was achieved before the $51,6 million investment (not 100). Agreed with the threat of hardware commoditization, though looking at the CEO’s background and impressive IP within Skyera I personally believe this is one of the companies that may prove to be the exception to the rule. Willem