Tegile Systems, provider of hybrid storage arrays for virtualized server and virtual desktop environments, announced the closing of a US$35m Round C funding, led by late-stage venture capital firm Meritech Capital Partners.

The round was joined by original stakeholder August Capital and partners Western Digital and SanDisk. Paul Madera, managing director of Meritech, joined Tegile’s board of directors.

This was Tegile’s “scaling round,” which allows the company to accelerate expansion of its technology and go-to-market strategy. The company is planning to use the capital raised to strengthen its sales and customer support efforts throughout its North American and European channels and to accelerate new product and technology development.

Tegile’s Zebi product line currently features enterprise-class hard drives and SSDs from HGST, a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital (one of the Round C participants). The equity investment extends Tegile’s existing relationship with HGST to include joint technology development.

The companies are working together on next-generation storage technology and solutions optimized for a range of industries and applications, including server virtualization, VDI, database hosting and file services.

Tegile's Zebi hybrid storage arrays combine the performance of SSD and low cost per TB of high capacity disk drives.

The round’s lead investor, Meritech has backed a number of data storage companies, including BlueArc, Cloudera and Fusion-io among others.

“Our investment philosophy is to fund companies that have a unique product, have a proven business model and are gaining traction within the industry – all traits exhibited by Tegile,” Madera said. “Like many of the best tech companies we’ve invested in during the past decade, Tegile has the leadership and the innovative potential to be quite transformative.”