Skyera Inc. and Western Digital® Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC) today  announced that Skyera has received strategic funding from Western Digital Capital  as part of its recently announced Series B round of financing. 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. Western Digital had previously funded  Skyera as its initial outside investor.

“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.”

Skyera’s skyHawk series of enterprise solid-state storage systems,  priced at an industry breakthrough price point of less than $3 per gigabyte, mark  the first time that the latest generation 19/20nm solid-state technology can be  used as a direct replacement for traditional enterprise hard disk-based systems.

Skyera’s skyHawk  solid-state solution has received industry acclaim as a visionary and  innovative product, substantiating Skyera’s approach to mainstream enterprise solid-state  storage. Its SEOS™ solid-state operating system combines  hardware, storage and data management into a unified solution that provides top  performance, cost and power consumption attributes.

About Skyera
  Skyera  Inc. is a disruptive provider of enterprise solid-state storage systems  designed to enable a large class of applications with extraordinarily high  performance, exceptionally lower power consumption and cost effectiveness  relative to existing enterprise storage systems. Founded by the executives who  previously developed the world's most-advanced flash memory controller, Skyera  is backed by key technology and financial partnerships designed to position it  at the forefront of the hyper growth in the solid-state storage sector. The  company was chosen by Flash Memory Summit as a Best of Show award winner for  2012 in the category of Most Innovative Flash Memory Enterprise Business  Application. For more information about the company, visit skyera.com.