Nutanix, Inc. is an American cloud computing company that sells software for datacenters and hybrid multi-cloud deployments. This includes software for virtualization, Kubernetes, database-as-a-service, software-defined networking, security, as well as
software-defined storage for file, object, and block storage.
History
Nutanix was founded on September 23, 2009, by
Dheeraj Pandey,
Mohit Aron and Ajeet Singh. In early 2013 Aron left Nutanix to start
Cohesity, a privately held
computer data storage
Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers.
The cent ...
company.
Venture capital
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...
firms invested $312.2 million over five rounds of funding in Nutanix. The company reached a $1 billion valuation by 2013, which made it known as a "
unicorn startup". It raised $140 million in a
Series E round of financing in 2014, valuing the company at approximately $2 billion.
Nutanix's backers included
Lightspeed Venture Partners,
Khosla Ventures, and
Blumberg Capital.
Nutanix filed for an
initial public offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investm ...
(IPO) in December 2015, reporting a net loss in its fiscal year ending July 2015 of $126 million. In August 2016, Nutanix announced it had acquired
PernixData.
The IPO on September 30, 2016, raised about $230 million after selling 14.87 million shares at a price of $16. This was the biggest VC-backed IPO of 2016 in the U.S. Analysts expected Nutanix's public offering would be delayed.
In May 2017, Nutanix partnered with
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
to create a series of datacenter hardware appliances using IBM Power Systems for
business apps.
In March 2018, Nutanix announced the acquisition of Minjar, based in
Bangalore
Bengaluru, also known as Bangalore (List of renamed places in India#Karnataka, its official name until 1 November 2014), is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the southern States and union territories of India, Indian state of Kar ...
and
Netsil, a San Francisco-based cloud application monitoring startup. Later the same year, Nutanix acquired the DaaS startup Frame.
On June 1, 2019, Nutanix appointed Brian Stevens to its board of directors. In March 2020,
Sohaib Abbasi joined the company's board of directors.
Due to the
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...
, Nutanix announced a furlough impacting about 1,500 employees in April 2020. In June 2020, Nutanix added Virginia Gambale to its board of directors.
In December, 2020, Pandey was replaced as Chief Executive by Rajiv Ramaswami, who had been the Chief Operating Officer at
VMware.
VMware filed a lawsuit, alleging a conflict of interest, but dropped the legal fight a year later.
In 2021, the company transitioned from making hardware appliances to focusing on subscription software.
In 2022,
MinIO alleged that Nutanix had been violating MinIO's free software license for the past three years, with good faith negotiations over the matter breaking down and Nutanix's license being revoked as a consequence.
Acquisitions
Operations
Nutanix combines
storage,
computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...
, and
virtualization. The company's software product families include Acropolis, Prism, Era, Frame, and Files. In 2015, Nutanix was reported to have built a Linux KVM based
hypervisor, called AHV (Acropolis HyperVisor) in order to make managing computer infrastructure easier.
Nutanix marketed its products as "
hyper-converged infrastructure".
In 2020, the company shifted to a
subscription business model
The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century. It ...
.
See also
*
Harvester (HCI)
References
{{Cloud computing
Software companies established in 2009
Cloud infrastructure
Companies listed on the Nasdaq
2016 initial public offerings
2009 establishments in California
Software companies of the United States