Navin Chaddha shares POV on Mayfield’s investment in Fungible

At Mayfield, our motto is people first. Over our 47 year history, we have been fortunate to partner with legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Bob Metcalfe of 3Com, David Scott of 3PAR, Ben Rosen and Rod Canion of Compaq, Eli Harari of SanDisk, Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics, Jimmy Treybig of Tandem, and Dado Banatao of S3. When we were presented with the opportunity to join forces with another set of luminaries, Pradeep Sindhu, founder of Juniper Networks, and Bertrand Serlet, the Apple software executive commonly known as the brains behind MacOS we were honored. And when we discovered that in the tradition of bold entrepreneurs pursuing big ideas, Pradeep and Bertrand, intend to build the next great cloud data center systems company in the over $100 billion data center server/storage/systems market, we were eager to begin the journey with them.

One of the biggest challenges facing the high technology industry today is how to make radical improvements to the performance, economics, security, and reliability of cloud data centers given the slowdown of Moore’s Law and the progressive increase in the ratio of communication to computation for contemporary applications. Pradeep, Bertrand and their team of world-class technologists are developing a revolutionary full-stack solution (silicon, infrastructure software, system) at the intersection of compute, storage and networking for data centers built on the “scale-out” principle.

This solution will apply at all scales: small, medium, large, and hyperscale. The technology will provide significant improvements to the overall performance, economics, security, and reliability of cloud data centers compared not only to the legacy architectures but also best in class scale-out architectures of the leading public cloud providers (like Amazon, Google and Microsoft). These improvements will be possible while continuing to leverage existing industry standard components for compute (e.g., X86 CPUs, GPUs, deep learning chips, and FPGA’s), storage (SSD’s and HDD’s) as well as industry standard network protocols and industry standard local bus interfaces.

Every decade there is a platform shift in the technology industry. The 1960s were about main-frame computing with companies like IBM, 1970s were about mini-computers with companies like Digital and Tandem, 1980s were about personal computers with companies like Apple and Dell, 1990s about web computing with companies like SUN Microsystems, and the 2000s were about mobile computing with companies like Apple and now we are in the cloud computing era. By co-leading Fungible’s Series A financing, which was announced today, we are excited to help Pradeep & his team build Fungible into an iconic company of the cloud era.

Read more from Mayfield Managing Director, Navin Chaddha.

Originally published at blog.mayfield.com on February 8, 2017.