Simplyblock secures $2.75M in seed funding

Berlin-based startup Simplyblock has successfully secured $2.75 million in seed funding, led by notable investors such as 42CAP and Antler. With a focus on high-performance cloud storage, Simplyblock plans to disrupt the market with its technology

Berlin, February 15, 2023 - Berlin-based startup Simplyblock, which specializes in cloud storage solutions, today announced a successful seed funding round of $2.75 million.

The round was led by 42CAP, a pan-European seed-stage VC firm, together with Antler, one of the most active early-stage investors in Europe, and Begin Capital, an international VC firm based in London. Angel investors include Johan Svensson, the founder of Neo4j, a graph database company.

Focus on cloud storage solutions

As a CIO, I have questioned the cost-performance ratio of enterprise storage systems in light of the latest generation of storage hardware such as ultra-fast NVMe SSDs.

Michael Schmidt, Co-Founder and CTO Simplyblock

Simplyblock develops low-latency cloud storage solutions. In an area traditionally dominated by US cloud providers and Israeli startups, Simplyblock is the only European startup operating in this sector. The company is initially targeting database users of any kind (SQL, NoSQL, Vector or Graph) as its first customers. The first version of Simplyblock will be available to AWS users worldwide.

We were surprised how much optimization potential there still is in the area of data storage

Moritz Zimmermann, General Partner at 42CAP

The startup leverages the latest advances in SSD technology (NVMe technology) to provide predictable, ultra-low latency software to realize the full potential of the underlying hardware for users. The technology, largely written in C/C++ to take advantage of low-level Linux features, enables millions of operations per second (IOPS) to be performed with millisecond latency. This means that the software is up to 10 times faster and offers a 50 times better cost/performance ratio than traditional enterprise solutions and existing cloud storage.

Data usage and storage will grow exponentially and therefore there will be an expected price increase from the supply side.

Joël van Dijk, Partner at Begin Capital

Simplyblock's technology is particularly important as data volumes are expected to increase by 1,000% by 2030. As a result, the data storage market is expected to be worth $250 billion as more and more companies look for fast, affordable and secure storage solutions.

Another important aspect of this technology is its environmental impact. Data centers are responsible for more CO2 emissions than the aviation industry. The International Energy Agency has called on data centers to halve their emissions by 2030. The low latency, high performance solution developed by Simplyblock will reduce energy consumption for cloud storage accordingly.

Expansion of the team planned

Although Simplyblock is already running for early access customers running databases on AWS, the funding round will allow Simplyblock to expand its engineering team and bring the product to general availability later in the year. Simplyblock's founders first met while Antler was in Berlin in 2022.

Rob and Michael really inspired us as a founding team. They make a very compelling combination

Alan Poensgen, Partner Antler

Rob Pankow, co-founder and CEO, previously held senior positions at Rocket Internet startups and Delivery Hero. His background is in scaling companies at various stages of growth. He leads sales and business development at Simplyblock. Michael Schmidt, co-founder and CTO, worked in IT for 20 years, held CTO positions in large companies and founded several companies in the enterprise software space.

The founders have already built a small but experienced team of ten people, including engineers who have worked for companies such as NVIDIA, Mellanox, NetApp, Dell EMC, Instana and Timescale.