Skyera has received strategic funding from Western Digital Capital. Having previously funded Skyera as the initial outside investor, Western Digital's investment arm co-invested in the series B round as the two storage solutions makers enter into a joint agreement. Western Digital Capital co-invested in the $51 million round as an extension of the strategic relationship between the two companies that also includes joint technology development.

"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," said Radoslav Danilak, chief executive officer of Skyera. "With our skyHawk family of enterprise solid-state storage systems we are witnessing the next era of solid-state storage and 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."

"One of our primary goals in developing strategic relationships with technology innovators in the broader storage ecosystem is to enable customers to develop highly optimized storage solutions that meet their changing data management needs," said Steve Milligan, president and chief executive officer, Western Digital. "We see companies like Skyera as offering a dramatic improvement over traditional approaches to emerging storage challenges. We will continue to support innovation by collaborating with customers and partners, and investing in companies who are addressing today's most exciting storage opportunities."

Based on 19/20nm solid-state technology, Skyera's skyHawk series of enterprise solid-state storage systems are priced at less than $3 per gigabyte and can be used as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise hard disk-based systems, Skyera claims.