Feb 12, 2020

Model9 , an Israeli startup launched by mainframe vets, has come up with a way to transfer data between mainframe computers and the cloud, and today the company announced a $9 million Series A. Intel Capital led the round with help from existing investors including StageOne, North First Ventures and Glenrock Israel. The company reports it has now raised almost $13 million. You may not realize it, but the largest companies in the world like big banks, insurance companies, airlines and retailers still use mainframes. These companies require the massive transaction processing capabilities of these stalwart machines, but find it’s difficult to get the valuable data out for more modern analytics capabilities. This is the hard problem that Model9 is attempting to solve. Gil Peleg, CEO and co-founder at Model9, says that his company’s technology is focused on helping mainframe users get their data to the cloud or other on-prem storage. “Mainframe data is locked behind proprietary storage that is inaccessible to anything that’s happening in the evolving, fast-moving technology world in the cloud. And this is where we come in with patented technology that enables mainframes to read and write data directly to the cloud or any non-mainframe distributed storage system,” Peleg explained. This has several important use cases. For starters, it can act as a disaster recovery system eliminating the need to maintain expensive tape backups. It can also move this data to the cloud where customers can apply modern analytics to data that was previously inaccessible. The company’s solution works with AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and IBM’s cloud solution. It also works with other on-prem storage solutions like EMC, Nutanix, NetApp and Hitatchi. He says the idea is to give customers true hybrid cloud options, whether a private cloud or a public cloud provider. “Ideally our customers will deploy a hybrid cloud topology and benefit from both worlds. The mainframe keeps doing what it should do as a reliable, secure, trusted [machine], and the cloud can manage the scale and the rapidly growing amount of data and provide the new modern technologies for disaster recovery, data management and analytics,” he said. The company was founded in 2016 and took a couple of years to develop the solution. Today, the company has 10 customers, but these are the kinds of large organizations that would be using mainframes. Peleg says, he wants to use the money to expand the sales and marketing operation to grow the market for this solution.