SolidFire, a next-generation cloud computing storage platform, has closed its first round of venture capital funding, led by Valhalla Partners and Novak Biddle Venture Partners.

Named to SolidFire's Board of Directors are Valhalla General Partner Charles Curran, and Novak Biddle General Partner Phil Bronner. In addition, Atlanta entrepreneur and former Turner Broadcasting executive Greg Foster has joined the Company’s Board of Advisors.

"Both Valhalla and Novak Biddle bring a wealth of experience in the cloud computing and storage arena," said Dave Wright, founder and CEO of SolidFire. "We look forward to working closely with Phil and Charles to build a great company."

SolidFire’s cloud-scale, block-based storage system provides reliable, high performance storage in the cloud based on commodity hardware. The Company’s architecture has been designed to optimize the performance of solid state storage (SSD) to provide a significant increase in performance and capacity per storage dollar spent. SolidFire’s solution allows cloud providers and enterprises to take advantage of the performance, reliability and energy efficiency advantages of solid state storage at a price point comparable to conventional spinning disk storage.

"SolidFire virtually eliminates the cost tradeoff of using solid state storage in the cloud," said Curran. "Valhalla is excited to be a part of a venture that will have an enormous impact on the cloud storage space."

"We are impressed with the revolutionary approach Dave and the SolidFire team have taken to solving this growing problem," said Bronner. "Novak Biddle is proud to back a proven entrepreneur with a great technology solution."

Prior to SolidFire, Wright was founder and CEO of Jungle Disk, the first commercial cloud storage and backup service built on the Amazon S3 cloud storage platform. Jungle Disk was acquired by cloud computing provider Rackspace Hosting in 2008.