Pure Storage

Pure Storage, Inc. is an American publicly traded technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, United States. It develops all-flash data storage hardware and software products. Pure Storage was founded in 2009 and developed its products in stealth mode until 2011. Afterwards, the company grew in revenues by about 50% per quarter and raised more than $470 million in venture capital funding, before going public in 2015. Initially, Pure Storage developed the software for storage controllers and used generic flash storage hardware. Pure Storage finished developing its own proprietary flash storage hardware in 2015.

Corporate history

Pure Storage was founded in 2009 under the code name Os76 Inc. by John Colgrove and John Hayes. Initially, the company was setup within the offices of Sutter Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm, and funded with $5 million in early investments. Pure Storage raised another $20 million in venture capital in a series B funding round.

The company came out of stealth mode as Pure Storage in August 2011. Simultaneously, Pure Storage announced it had raised $30 million in a third round of venture capital funding. Another $40 million was raised in August 2012, in order to fund Pure Storage's expansion into European markets. In May 2013, the venture capital arm of the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), In-Q-Tel, made an investment in Pure Storage for an un-disclosed amount. That August, Pure Storage raised another $150 million in funding. By this time, the company had raised a total of $245 million in venture capital investments. The following year, in 2014, Pure Storage raised $225 million in a series F funding round, valuating the company at $3 billion.

Annual revenues for Pure Storage grew by almost 50% per quarter, from 2012 to 2014. It had $6 million in revenues in fiscal 2013, $43 million in fiscal 2014, and $174 million in fiscal 2015. Pure Storage sold 100 devices its first year of commercial production in 2012 and 1,000 devices in 2014. By late 2014, Pure Storage had 750 employees. Although it was growing, the company was not profitable. It lost $180 million in 2014.

In 2013, EMC sued Pure Storage and 44 of its employees who were former EMC employees, alleging theft of EMC's intellectual property. EMC also claimed that Pure Storage infringed some of their patents. Pure Storage counter-sued, alleging that EMC illegally obtained a Pure Storage appliance for reverse engineering purposes. In 2016, a jury initially awarded $14 million to EMC. A judge reversed the award and ordered a new trial to determine whether the EMC patent at issue was valid. Pure Storage and EMC subsequently settled the case for $30 million.

Pure Storage filed a notification of its intent to go public with the Securities Exchange Commission in August 2015. That October, 25 million shares were sold for a total of $425 million. The company hosted its first annual user conference in 2016. The following year, the Board of Directors appointed Charles Giancarlo as CEO, replacing Scott Dietzen. In 2017 (2018 fiscal year), Pure Storage was profitable for the first time and surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue. In Nov 2024, Pure Storage was one of the investors in the AI oriented cloud provider CoreWeave's secondary share sale.

Acquisitions

In August 2018, Pure Storage made its first acquisition with the purchase of a data deduplication software company called StorReduce, for $25 million. In April the following year, they announced a definitive agreement for an undisclosed amount to acquire Compuverde, a software-based file storage company.

In September 2020, Pure Storage acquired Portworx, a provider of cloud-native storage and data-management platform based on Kubernetes, for $370 million.

Products

Pure Storage develops all-flash storage arrays as an alternative to traditional hard disk drives and hybrid disk/flash systems. The company started out as a hardware/software vendor, but over time added more subscription-based services. Pure Storage develops its own software and flash storage hardware and uses its own operating system called Purity. Its various families of hardware/software products are optimized for different applications, such as artificial intelligence, cloud-native applications, backup storage, and databases.

Pure Storage released its first hardware/software products, the FlashArray family, in 2011. This was followed by the Evergreen family of subscription services in 2015 and the FlashBlade product family in 2016. The operating system was expanded with a set of features called Fusion in 2021, which optimizes storage automatically across storage arrays.

Data Breach

In 2024, PureStorage suffered a data breach and extortion attempt as part of the 2024 Snowflake mass hacking campaign. The data stolen included customer and internal system information, and did not include PII for any of its customers.

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Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange
Computer companies established in 2009
2015 initial public offerings
Computer hardware companies
Computer storage companies
Cloud storage
Storage software
Computer data storage
Data storage
Information technology companies of the United States
Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Companies based in Santa Clara, California
Companies based in Silicon Valley
Computer companies of the United States
Software companies of the United States
Companies in the S&P 400