Actifio is growing like a weed—just like the data it tries to help companies tame—and it has just raised one of the bigger Boston-area tech financing rounds of the year.
The Waltham, MA-based data management startup said today it has closed $33.5 million in Series C funding led by new investor Andreessen Horowitz. Previous investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures also participated in the round. The company says the money will be used to expand operations globally and increase awareness and sales of its products. The addition of a West Coast investor like Andreessen Horowitz indicates the startup is pretty serious about going big; whether it will succeed remains to be seen.
Actifio has been roughly doubling the size of its investment rounds over the past couple of years. It closed an $8 million A round in early 2010 and followed that up with a $16 million B round later that year. The startup has grown to about 100 employees, up from 50 in July 2010.
The big idea behind the startup is to virtualize data management—starting with backup, protection, and recovery services—for big companies. That means doing for data storage and protection what VMware, Cisco, and other giants have done for computing power and networking, via a unified software platform. “Virtualization” refers to the important IT trend of separating software from hardware—and applications from operating systems—in big, messy computer systems.
“This financing further empowers our team and clients to completely shift the way we think about traditional, legacy IT solutions and virtualizing the management of data-–-including eliminating backup software,” says Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh (a veteran of HP and AppIQ), in a statement. “This is a similar paradigm shift ushered in by VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and others, via server virtualization.”
