BOULDER - SolidFire Inc., a Boulder-based tech startup, announced Tuesday it has raised a $25 million Series B funding round, increasing the amount of venture capital it has raised in less than a year to $37 million.

SolidFire develops solid-state data storage systems for cloud service providers. The company was founded last year and moved to Boulder in the spring. Its office and a development lab are at 1620 Pearl St.

Both the amount of money invested in SolidFire and the short time it has taken for the company to become one of the Boulder area's best-funded startups are eye catching.

"We are very fortunate to be working with a very hot technology in a very hot market. It draws a lot interest from the investment community," founder and chief executive Dave Wright said in an interview.

"We have a proven team investors feel confident in," Wright said.

The money will go to expand the sales and marketing departments and build the technical development team.

Participating in the round are New Enterprise Associates, a global venture capital firm that has offices in Menlo Park, California, and New York City; Valhalla Partners, which is based in Vienna, Virginia; and Novak Biddle Venture Partners, located in Bethesda, Maryland.

The company also received individual investments from advisers Frank Slootman, former CEO of Data Domain; David Schneider, former vice president of Worldwide Sales at Data Domain; and Greg Papadopoulos, former vice president and chief technical officer of Sun Microsystems.

"SolidFire has a great head start coupled with deep customer interest; we are excited to be able to accelerate their execution in the market," New Enterprise Associates' general partner Harry Weller said in a press release. "The SolidFire technology is extremely advanced and built from the ground up to leverage the benefits of an all-SSD platform. Combining the latest in performance management, real-time data efficiencies, and system automation, their product is very attractive to cloud service providers, who can take advantage of this technology today."

SolidFire is working in a relatively new segment of the data-storage industry. Solid state memory uses chips, not the spinning disks used by traditional hard drives. Users of smartphones and digital cameras likely are familiar with the solid state memory from using flash memory.

SolidFire vice president of marketing Jay Prassl said the storage systems developed by SolidFire are akin to "flash on steroids."

SolidFire is targeting cloud service providers with massive data storage needs. That market is expected to grow as more and more business applications move from servers owned by individual companies to the cloud, Prassl said.

The funding gives SolidFire a big enough war chest that it can accelerate its growth and not have to focus on courting investors, Prassl said.

"It takes the weight off. We now can focus on execution. We don't have to focus on our runway and how long it is or how short it is," Prassl said.

SolidFire has about 30 employees and is looking to expand to close to 50 employees in the next six to nine months, Prassl said.

Wright founded SolidFire in Georgia after leaving Rackspace, a cloud hosting provider. Wright joined Rackspace in 2008 after it acquired Jungle Disk, a cloud-based data storage and backup company Wright founded.

Wright and SolidFire relocated to Boulder from Georgia to take advantage of the area's history of innovation in data storage, he said.

"It was really all about access to great storage talent," he said.

SolidFire already has recruited some of that talent to its management ranks. Veterans of LeftHand Networks Inc., a Boulder-based data-storage developer that was purchased by Hewlett-Packard in 2008, lead SolidFire's sales and marketing, product management, support and services and quality assurance units.