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Simplivity, a company that sells IT hardware that’s intended to be simpler to deploy than traditional machines, has secured a $175 million Series D round of funding at a post-money valuation of more than $1 billion.
The investment was led by Waypoint Capital, a Switzerland-based growth equity fund controlled by the Bertarelli family, which made its fortune with Serono, a pharmaceutical company. Waypoint invested in Simplivity after experiencing the product as a customer.
The fund’s head of technology, Frederic Wohlwend, found Simplivity’s OmniCube product to be much easier to deploy than traditional backend servers. The startup’s technology combines the functions of several different parts of a data center, including servers and storage, into one machine that runs in a smaller space and at a lower operational cost.
Wohlwend decided to replace the hardware he had been using before. “We trashed our entire back end infrastructure,” he said in an interview.
The fund typically invests in life sciences companies but is now considering setting up a tech fund.
Doron Kempel, Simplivity’s CEO, says the product is meant to address what he calls a “significant pain point” in enterprise IT: Complexity. The product is nearly two years old, and Simplivity has shipped more than 1,500 systems to customers like T-Mobile, Major League Baseball, and Swisscom.
Prior investors include the venture capital firms Accel Partners, Charles River Ventures, DFJ Growth, Kleiner Perkins and Meritech Capital Partners, all of which contributed to the round. The funding brings Simplivity’s total capital raised to $276 million.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
