Alicorn Global Ventures (“Alicorn”), the venture capital arm of international B Corp investment group Arowana, is pleased to announce the closing of its investment in Pliops, an Israeli hardware storage acceleration company. The investment comes at a key growth inflexion point for Pliops and represents the sixth company that Alicorn has invested in as part of its global venture capital secondaries strategy.

Alicorn has invested a total of US$4m to acquire secondary shares in Pliops, a technology leader in storage hardware accelerators headquartered in Israel. The company enables cloud and enterprise customers to offload and accelerate data-intensive workloads using a fraction of the computational load and power, at significantly lower cost. Its solution is helping companies and data centres alike to deal with an explosion in data workloads as CPUs struggle to keep up. Their patent-backed hardware offers breakthrough economics and performance for a wide range of data centre applications.

Pliops’ client base includes some of the world’s largest cloud, web and edge service providers in addition to Fortune 1,000 IT companies. The company is backed by leading companies in the compute and storage space including Western Digital, Xilinx (AMD), Mellanox (NVIDIA), Intel and most recently Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT).

Alicorn’s Principal, Alexander Assim, commented: “Pliops’ Storage Processor is solving a business-critical yet worsening problem: exponential growth in data workloads combined with an end to Moore’s law. This convergence of trends is creating a race to solve a massive compute problem that we’re consistently losing.

“Pliops’ hardware-based solution eliminates the inherent inefficiencies present in both databases, analytics, machine learning and software-defined storage and is already proving itself as the solution to the problem,” Assim added. “We are very excited to be working with Uri Beitler and the team at Pliops. We are confident in their ability to execute and grow, and look forward to the journey ahead.”

Alicorn founder Kevin Chin said: “At a time when semiconductors are back in focus, we are delighted to be investing in a company at the front of the adoption curve and in the latest advancements in hardware acceleration technology.

“Alicorn’s access continues to enable opportunities to invest in top-tier companies and teams like Pliops and we’re pleased to have led this investment alongside new and existing family office relationships.”

Alicorn is a global venture capital firm established by the B Corporation-accredited investment group Arowana in 2018. The team’s expertise lies in secondary investments and bespoke primary funding rounds in VC-backed technology companies at a late growth stage. Alicorn works with these companies, their existing venture capital investors, and other stakeholders to facilitate secondary investments to solve liquidity requirements in addition to participating in unique primary rounds

Arowana is an international B Corporation investment group that has operating companies and investments across the United Kingdom, South East Asia, Australia, Europe and the United States. Established in 2007, Arowana’s purpose is to grow people, grow companies and grow value.