A California-based producer of data storage systems has opened a new office in Durham that could accommodate up to 100 employees.
Privately held Nimble Storage, fueled by nearly $100 million in venture capital and a rapidly expanding customer base, opened its 15,800-square-foot office on Emperor Boulevard earlier this month. Today the office has 10 employees, and the company is currently looking to hire at least a dozen more , said Dan Leary, vice president of marketing.
“We got a facility that can go up to 100 (employees) because we think we have a short-term potential to be growing to those sorts of numbers fairly quickly,” Leary said.
He declined to speculate on what the company’s hiring timetable will be. “It’s possible we would need more space in less than a few years,” he said. “ ... We’re a small and fast-growing company and part of what has allowed us to succeed is flexibility.”
Nimble’s Durham office, its first on the East Coast, includes engineering, technical support and sales. Leary said other functions could be added later.
The company’s need for workers with “advanced technical skills” led it to the Triangle, Leary said. “It’s just a great place in terms of talent.”
Nimble Storage touts that its data storage hardware and software systems provides upgraded performance and greater capacity at a lower price than traditional storage systems. It also claims its systems are simpler to operate.
“For a customer, we can typically deliver five times the performance and five times the usable capacity ... for the same price or less than what you would get comparably” elsewhere, Leary said.
Founded in 2008, the Silicon Valley company has shipped more than 2,000 systems to over 1,100 customers. In its latest quarter, new customer orders exceeded $25 million, Leary said.
Nimble expanded from 140 workers at the end of January 2012, which was the end of its last fiscal year, to more than 340 today. The 200 workers hired during that span is double what the company had projected, Leary said.
In September Nimble attracted $40.7 million in venture capital, boosting its total funding to $98 million. The company said at the time that it was anticipating an initial public offering of common stock in its future.
“We’re still down the path towards an IPO,” Leary said. “I’m not going to be able to comment to the specifics of the timing.”
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