Fungible sold to Microsoft for $190 million, say multiple sources – Blocks and Files

▤ Summary

The company has appeared increasingly troubled after it laid off staff in August and shrank its product line in November, rowing back on its composable infrastructure ambitions to focus on DPU-enhanced NVMe/TCP storage arrays. Consultant Dylan Patel, who first broke the story in his subscription-based SemiAnalysis newsletter yesterday, told B&F: “Fungible scrambled for funding from multiple sources and even tried to sell to Meta, but they couldn’t get any traction in the end. Serlet progressed to SVP for software engineering at Apple and then founded consumer cloud storage business Upthere, which was bought by Western Digital in 2017. He and Sindhu devised and built a Data Processing Unit (DPU) chip to offload east-west datacenter traffic, mostly dealing with storage, networking and security matters from host x86 server CPUs, enabling fewer of them to run more application code. However, Fungible was fighting competitors on three fronts: • Liqid and other composable systems vendors with CXL becoming the composability fabric and Fungible having no CXL message • Nvidia (BlueField), Intel, and AMD (Pensando) on the DPU front Intel has won over some hyperscale DPU customers and AMD’s Pensando has also established a list of buyers, as well as BlueField Arm processor core support.

▦ Linked Companies

Microsoft

$1B+