Alicorn, the global venture capital arm of Arowana, has just closed its investment in Pliops, an Israeli hardware storage acceleration company. It comes at a key growth inflection 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 that 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 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).

As a storage processor company, Pliops 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 are consistently losing.

The company’s 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. 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.