By Zsana Hoskins | Updated on Jun 10, 2026 at 07:19 PM
DDN, a data hardware and software provider that counts Nvidia Corp. as a partner and Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Salesforce Inc. as customers, is looking to raise additional funding by the end of the year, Chief Executive Officer Alex Bouzari said.
In carrying out another investment round, DDN is seeking to attract investors that can help the company better reflect the value it creates for customers, Bouzari said in an interview on Tuesday while at the Bloomberg Generative AI Forum in New York.
The company wants to bring in more strategic investors who “see the world through a different lens,” he said. “The intent is not bringing money into the company because we need it — it’s bringing more savvy, sophisticated, smart people into our circle.”
Formerly DataDirect Networks Inc., Chatsworth, California-based DDN was founded in 1998 and has been running profitably as a private company for more than a decade. Less than four months ago, DDN named a finance and operations chief in a step toward boosting growth and planning an initial public offering. The company has been trying to shift from a seller of high-performance storage for supercomputers to focus on AI data centers where its products help customers access information quickly by bolstering the performance of chips like Nvidia’s.
Last year, Blackstone Inc. invested $300 million in DDN at a $5 billion valuation. It’s unclear what a fresh funding round might value the company at. The firm’s products support Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, for clients including Elon Musk’s xAI and the AI cloud-computing firm Lambda.