After months of back-and-forth product updates in the flash storage ecosystem, Tintri Inc. is upping the ante with the announcement of a landmark $125 million funding round meant to help expand the adoption of its hybrid array series. The appliances are already among the most popular of their kind.

Tintri hit the scene seven years ago as part of the first wave of flash storage startups and has used that time to build up an impressive customer base that includes General Electric Co., Sony Corp. and dozens of other corporate heavy-hitters. Overall, nearly half of the organizations using its arrays report annual revenues of more than $1 billion, with the remainder including numerous government agencies.

The startup estimates thats its arrays are used to store about 50 petabytes of data in support of more than 400,000 virtual machines, a figure that few of its rivals can match. The new funding is meant to keep it that way and tilt the playing field against those competitors that do play in the same league, most notably Nimble Storage Inc. and Tegile Systems Inc., which raised $70 million in a funding round of its own two months ago.

That investment grew the company’s war chest to roughly $135 million, only slightly less than Tintri’s at the time, while Nimble is sitting on nearly $100 million. The new $125 million investment changes that balance drastically, pushing the company close to the top of the venture capital chart in the flash storage ecosystem with a grand total of $260 million raised so far.

Most of that cash came from Insight Venture Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Menlo Ventures and New Enterprise Associates, which also participated in today’s round alongside new investor Silver Lake. The private equity giant has a reputation for high-stake capital gambits, having contributed over $1 billion to the leveraged buyout that took Dell Inc. off the stock market last year.

Tintri isn’t thinking in such grandiose terms quite yet, but does claim triple-digit annual revenue growth that the new funding aims to help extend to the rest of 2015 and beyond. The company is vague about exactly how the capital will be used, but it’s safe assume the sales, marketing and engineering teams will be among the main beneficiaries.

Photo via Tintri