Nasuni has scooped up another heap of cash to push its cloud storage products to more big companies around the world.
Today the Natick, MA-based firm announced $25 million in new funding. That includes a $17.5 million Series E equity round led by new investor Sigma Prime Ventures, with contributions from earlier backers Flybridge Capital Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, and another large, undisclosed investor. That brings Nasuni’s total equity funding haul to $80.5 million. Nasuni also announced $7.5 million in venture debt funding from Eastward Capital Partners.
Nasuni could have broken even on cash flow next year, but it opted to invest more in the business instead, says Scott Dussault, the company’s chief operating and financial officer.
“We’re making some investments now to grow faster,” he says. “But even with that, the money still gets us to cash-flow break even. We’re pushing [that goal] out to 2018.”
Businesses, particularly large enterprises, are accumulating humongous amounts of data and looking for ways to store, manage, and protect that deluge of information in cheaper and more efficient ways. Founded in 2009, Nasuni is part of a movement toward cloud storage technologies that has gained traction over the past few years.
Nasuni’s technology handles cloud file storage, online backups, data management, disaster recovery, and other services. It’s aimed at distributed enterprises that have offices in various locations. The software stores all of a customer’s files in the cloud (with vendors like Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and IBM), but it also keeps copies of active files cached to a local storage system so they can be accessed quickly and securely.
It took several years for big companies to overcome their reluctance to switch from traditional storage infrastructure and adopt cloud-based systems, says Nasuni co-founder and CEO Andres Rodriguez. (This so-called “cloud migration” has taken enterprises longer than most tech companies would have predicted in the late 2000s.)
“Now the momentum is with us,” Rodriguez says. “We have massive, massive enterprise organizations that are coming to us, where the CIOs are being asked to come up with a cloud-first strategy, especially when it comes to file storage.”
Nasuni wouldn’t share exact figures, but Dussault says the company grew its revenue by more than 75 percent this year. Its customers include large manufacturers, video game developers, advertising agencies, and construction firms.
“Those companies are drowning in files,” Rodriguez says. “They have such intense requirements of where those files are needed around the world, that they have adopted this as their go-to model for how they’re managing files.”
Now, the plan is to double down on Nasuni’s growth. The company intends to increase its 115-person staff by at least 25 percent next year, Dussault says. Nasuni opened a small U.K. office last year, and it’s considering opening a Germany outpost next year, he says.
“We’re really excited about our opportunity,” Dussault says. “We’re very much looking forward to 2017 and putting [the new capital] to work.”
