Amazon has acquired Israeli storage technology startup E8 Storage. The US retail giant paid $50-60 million for the developer of flash storage installations based on software.
The company was founded by CEO Zivan Ori and VP R&D Alex Friedman in 2014. E8 Storage has raised $18.3 million to date from venture capital funds Vertex, Excel, Magma and Circa, according to Crunchbase.
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Following the acquisition, the company’s 25 employees will join Amazon (AWS) development center in Tel Aviv.
E8 develops flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud. According to the company’s publications, flash storage is ten times faster than the existing hardware solutions in the market, while costing less.
E8 Storage’s solution is designed for companies looking to build private internal cloud infrastructure or to speed up performance for cloud suppliers such as Amazon (AWS). Using the company’s storage devices allows you to drive storage from your company’s local servers to large data centers without losing their capabilities, with emphasis on the speed of transmitting data.
The combination of software and hardware enables the creation of flexible data centers that can adjust their speed and effectiveness to the customer’s required scale of storage.
Throughout its years of operation, E8 has been working with Intel and Mellanox to market its storage products to its customers as part of the complete storage solutions.
Solutions of this kind for large data centers are being developed by technology giants to accelerate the performance of their internal data centers – this is Amazon’s main concern for the company, its internal use of this technology. According to sources, another reason that might be of interest to the buyer is the high quality of the staff at E8.
Amazon currently employs hundreds of employees in Israel in several areas: chip development for its cloud service (AWS) based on its Annapurna Labs activity it acquired, as well as cloud-related commercial activity (AWS); Developing technology to improve the possibility of ordering products through the voice assistant Alexa; Developing technology for Amazon’s Go-Shop without a box office; And employees in computer vision.
Globes recently learned that Amazon plans to launch an Israeli retail operation soon. This step is expected to have considerable implications for the domestic retail market, beyond the growing use of foreign trade sites. Amazon has begun to appeal to Israeli merchants through various surveys and is now allowing online stores in Hebrew to open on its platform. In addition to the effects on the retail market, the commercial real estate market response to this step was also immediate, and shares of mall companies’ shares plummeted, losing hundreds of millions of shekels.
In January, Amazon has acquired Israeli cloud startup CloudEndure, a developer of public cloud solutions, for an estimated $250 million.
Earlier in June, Google also acquired an Israeli cloud company Elastifile, which provides cloud storage technology to enterprise companies for ultra-large files. The company is expected to join Google’s cloud division.
