Software maker Liqid raises $28M for to-market push

BROOMFIELD — Liqid Inc., a company building software to remotely configure on-demand processing machines, announced it raised $28 million in its Series B funding round.

The Broomfield composable infrastructure company raised the funds primarily from Omaha-based Panorama Point Partners LLC, with additional financing from an affiliate of New York investment firm DH Capital and Iron Gate Capital in Louisville.

In an interview with BizWest, CEO Sumit Puri said the company is using the money to launch a heavy sales effort in the coming months. In particular, Liqid wants to pitch itself alongside its hardware partners such as Dell Technologies Inc. (NYSE: DELL) and Nvidia Corp. (Nasdaq: NVDA) when reaching out to potential clients.

“We think we can do more together with these companies rather than going out and trying to compete with them,” he said.

Puri expects the company to hire heavily in sales and marketing, along with adding more engineers to maintain the system. He didn’t lay out a specific hiring goal, but said it’s possible the company could go from 50 employees to potentially slightly less than double that figure.

In a press release, the company claimed it had doubled its quarter-to-quarter revenue from the second to third quarters of this year. Puri declined to specify what those revenue figures were, or how much profit it made.

Composable server infrastructure allows customers to pick and choose computing hardware parts in an off-site location and run them together for a specific job, such as powering an artificial intelligence program or rendering a large video file. It also allows unused processing components to be used by other companies and their software instead of running idle.

Until now, people have mainly been limited to the processing power of whatever hardware they have around them, or had to power down an entire off-site server system so an IT professional could install the needed part.

Puri said that flexibility is useful for a wide range of industries that require a large amount of very specific processing power. He also believes it’ll allow the next generation of data centers to start opening as internet latency becomes critical in decentralized computing.

“If you think about the next data centers, they’re not going to be big boxes in Arizona; they’re actually going to be very small regional deployments, close to the data because latency is important,” he said.