Skyera, a Flash-storage start-up, has received strategic funding from Western Digital Capital as part of its recently announced Series B round of financing. Western Digital is a disk-drive vendor.

Size of the round, led by Dell Ventures, was US$51.6m, and Western Digital's participation was an extension of an existing relationship between the two companies that also includes joint technology development. Western Digital was Skyera's first outside investor.

“The backing of Western Digital has enabled us to ramp our business across marketing, sales and engineering which has been instrumental in creating the industry’s most innovative solid-state solution,” Radoslav Danilak, Skyera's CEO, said. “I strongly believe that having a close working relationship with Western Digital, the world’s top disk drive vendor, is invaluable as we set out to reshape the storage landscape.”

Steve Milligan, president and CEO of Western Digital, said the company worked on developing strategic relationships with technology innovators to deliver optimized storage solutions that meet customers' changing data-management needs. “We see companies like Skyera as offering a dramatic improvement over traditional approaches to emerging storage challenges,” he said.

Skyera claims to have a price point for solid-sate storage that enables customers to replace disk storage with SSDs. Its skyHawk series of enterprise SSD systems is priced at less than $3 per gigabyte.