PITTSBURGH – JULY 10, 2012 – Avere Systems today announced that it has received an additional $20 million in funding bringing the total amount invested in the company to $52 million.  The Series C funding round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and also includes previous investors Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital.

The funding will be used to advance the market penetration of the company's FXT Series Edge filers, which are an integral building block for an Edge-Core architecture for NAS that ensures enterprise IT is best positioned to leverage the performance benefits of Flash, the consolidation benefits of virtualization and the collaborative and economic benefits of the cloud. Avere’s new architecture for NAS puts the fastest media and the intelligence to manage it closest to the user, boosting performance and removing storage bottlenecks created by legacy architectures.

Chris Schaepe of Lightspeed Venture Partners led the Series C financing. Chris is a founding managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners with over 20 years of venture capital experience in areas including enterprise storage, networking, cloud and mobile technologies. Chris was recently named to the 2012 Forbes Midas List of Top 100 Venture Capitalists.

“Avere has been successful in achieving revenue growth based on the fact that its Edge filers deliver superior performance while leveraging existing storage infrastructure in both local and remote access environments,” said Schaepe.   “The combination of a seasoned executive team, a well-established product line and the ability to capitalize on major technological shifts based on the emergence of Flash, virtualization and cloud deployments made the investment in Avere a compelling opportunity for Lightspeed. We look forward to working with the Avere team to continue to build a business that revolutionizes data storage.”

“This round of funding will be used to extend our market presence by leveraging the success of our Edge filer product line and scaling the outbound functions of the company,” said Ron Bianchini, President and CEO of Avere Systems. “As our largest round of funding to date, Series C is a vote of confidence in the Edge-Core NAS architecture and the ability to help organizations build a storage infrastructure that is fast and efficient, flexible and scalable, global and responsive.”