Flash startup Nimble Storage just received $40.7 million in mezzanine funding, increasing the total capital the company raised to date to nearly $98 million. The over-subscribed round was led by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, with participating from all of Nimble’s existing investors and new backer  GGV Capital.

Nimble will use the money to bolster operations, expand internationally and become more aggressive with its sales and engineering efforts. In a prepared statement that came with the release, Chief executive Suresh Vasudevan also made it public that his company is pursuing an IPO, citing “financial performance well ahead of our most aggressive estimate.”

The prospect of a public offering was undoubtedly brought up during negotiations over this latest funding round, and would account for all the enthusiasm on the VCs’ part.

“We’re gratified by the immense acceptance we’ve received from customers across a wide range of markets, and by the continued trust of our backers,” the CEO said of Nimble Storage.  “While most flash-based startups have concentrated narrowly on high-performance niches, we’ve leveraged flash into a much broader technology platform that delivers superior system performance, capacity efficiency, data protection, scalability, simplicity and overall ROI for mainstream enterprise applications.”

Nimble’s Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout architecture makes it possible to combine flash and SATA in one box, coupling the former technology’s performance advantages in cache form with the cost-efficiency of spinning disk. CASL is the lynchpin of company’s CS-Series storage arrays, which are used in over 1,000 deployments around the world according to new data released with the announcement.

Before the $40.7 million funding, Nimble was busy beefing up its integration with VMware. CASL was certified to run VMware View not too long ago, making Nimble’s hardware more accessible for VDI customers.