About a year ago, after his company raised $50 million and was valued at $500 million, Actifio CEO Ash Ashutosh had an IPO pretty clearly in his sights.
“The enterprise space is all about being a public company,” Ashutosh said, adding that Actifio was preparing to file for a public offering in the next 18 months or so.
But even in the world of enterprise data storage software, things can change fast. Today, Actifio announced that it’s raised $100 million led by Tiger Global Management, a round that values the company at $1 billion.
Previous investors also chipped in: North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. To date, the company has raised about $208 million.
And, for now, the IPO talk appears to be on a back burner. As Ashutosh told The Boston Globe, “Either we could go public, but we’re not quite ready for that one yet … or we could raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.”
Just what’s made Actifio such a highly valued company? The increasing need for businesses to corral the exponentially increasing amounts of data generated by their employees, partners, and customers.
Actifio’s pitch is to make a company’s life easier by giving it one software system to manage all of its key data. Instead of that information being repeated and replicated all across the company for various software applications, it’s centralized in Actifio’s system.
That also makes the data easier to access and work with, the company says. In essence, the company is applying virtualization technology to data management—it separates data backup and protection from the storage infrastructure.
The new fundraising puts Actifio squarely in the top echelon of private tech companies in the Boston area. And it probably ends the era of Actifio as a “sleeper company,” as Ashutosh told us last year.
