Composable infrastructure vendor Liqid raised a $100 million Series C funding round, bringing the startup’s total raised to around $160 million.

Lightrock and affiliates of DH Capital co-led Liqid’s latest investment with participation from Panorama Point Partners and Iron Gate Capital. The startup plans to use the funding to invest in go-to-market strategies, add headcount to its workforce, and expand to markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific region.

About 70% of the proceeds will be used for employee hiring to grow the business, Liqid CEO and co-founder Sumit Puri told SDxCentral. The company more than doubled its workforce this year, and Puri expects to double the company size again in the next few quarters.  

In addition, the vendor surpassed 100 customers this year. Its partners and customers include the U.S. Department of Defense, Intel, Dell Technologies, Broadcom, and Nvidia.

“The three-year compounded growth rate was over 1,000%,” Puri touted. “We expect over the next couple of years to continue this hyper-growth trajectory.”

Strong customer adoption of the composable infrastructure platform drove the growth, he added. Composable infrastructure creates fluid pools of compute, networking, and storage resources that can be composed and recomposed on the fly.

The platform’s big use cases are artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and edge computing. 

When the pandemic hit, increasing data center infrastructure’s agility and scalability becomes more important because of the supply chain shortage. 

“People are having to find ways to increase utilization rates in the middle of this supply chain [crisis], and disaggregated and composable and flexible architectures help,” Puri said.

Liqid’s technology is disaggregated and can scale and be reprogrammed remotely. Plus, composable infrastructure improves physical resource utilization, which enables a smaller infrastructure footprint that uses less power and cooling. 

Because of this, Liqid also focuses on increasing awareness of data centers' impact on the environment. The total number of data centers worldwide jumped from 500,000 in 2012 to more than 8 million this year, and current trajectories suggest that data centers will consume 20% of global energy by 2025, according to Puri. 

The platform’s dynamic reconfiguration capabilities can help squeeze up to 80% utilization out of the same hardware that normally sits at 20%, so “we think we can have a big impact on the environment,” he added.