Fred Destin

Isilon Systems, of which Atlas Venture are the largest shareholder, filed to go public on Friday under the joint tutelage of Morgan Stanley and Merril Lynch. 

Isilon provides clustered storage systems optimised for rich media content.  As arms merchants go it is hard to get better market timing given what is happening in the world of video right now…  MySpace is a customer for example; so is Kodak, to mix the new and the old.

Sujal Patel was "the man with a plan" in this case after his time as Chief Architect of RealNetworks (who owe him SureStream).  He then patented the distributed file system that enables Isilon clustered rich media architecture.  He is a nice and approachable guy who, as one might anticipate, seems scarily smart (I didn’t defy him at chess so I cannot confirm the rumours).  In other words, he deserves everything that is happening to him right now !

Atlas Venture led the first $8M round and was joined by Madrona Venture Group, with Greg McAdoo of Sequoia Capital coming in on the second $15M round.  Lehman and Focus Ventures led rounds 3 and 4 (for $15M and $20M respectively).   A further $10M  round was announced recently, meaning that the company has raised just under $70M to date..

[Note: I will post further as the process continues but strictly stale news of course (that’s commentary to you) given our involvement in the process.  I recommend this man for some real news.  And please don’t ask me any questions, respected members of the press, but rather talk to Jay Wampold, Sr. Director of Marketing Communications, at Isilon.]

technorati tags:atlasventure, isilon, sequoiacapital, sujalpatel