Actifio, a copy data virtualisation company, has secured an oversubscribed $100m funding round.
The funding round is led by Tiger Capital Management, LLC, and also involves current investors North Bridge, Greylock IL, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. Actifio will use the funds to accelerate expansion of market coverage, global brand development, and product feature enhancements in the world’s leading data management solution for virtualised and Cloud IT architectures.
Ash Ashutosh, Founder and CEO, Actifio, said: "From the start we have focused on building the next great technology brand with a singular focus on delighting our customers with revolutionary technology, enterprise-class service, and transformative business results.
"Having shone a light on the $46bn global copy data problem, we will use this funding round to expand our copy data virtualisation solution across the Global 2000; enable our cloud service provider partners to build thriving businesses powered by Actifio; and extend the reach of our technology down into an even broader base of the mid-market."
In the past, organisations have made use of an infrastructure-centric approach to managing data – resulting in multiple copies held in silos, rather than providing access to data when and wherever it is needed.
CIOs worldwide are working to improve business resiliency, increase business agility, and deepen business insights as they move toward public, private, and hybrid cloud-based IT architectures. As applications are modernised to achieve these goals, IT organisations are increasingly challenged by the complexity and cost associated with data – the fuel of these applications – bound to old, infrastructure-centric models. Over the past four years, Actifio has worked to deliver business transformation to hundreds of users worldwide with its pioneering information-centric data virtualisation paradigm, enabling businesses to move faster, be more resilient, enhance agility, and make use of the insights buried in their data.
The infrastructure-centric model of making and moving an independent copy of data closer to – and storing it for – independent backup, business continuity, dev & test, analytics, and compliance applications results in silos of redundant infrastructure. These are not only expensive but also highly restrictive, slowing access to information and rarely delivering on the service levels necessary for IT organisations supporting modern, always-on, agile businesses.
Actifio’s patented Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology is said to meet these evolving needs by enabling enterprise users and service providers to virtualise data management, and decouple their application data from their physical infrastructure. The firm claims the result is an order-of-magnitude improvement in business resiliency, agility and intelligence; with instant access to information from any point-in-time, for any application, at any location, to support any IT architecture; all while driving down costs by up to 90%.
The company also shared a series of operating metrics representing milestones in its remarkable progress entering 2014:
Marc Andreessen, co-founder and partner of Actifio investor Andreessen Horowitz, said: "Almost whatever you do, the data you produce doing it has huge value.
"Companies across every industry are struggling not only to protect that data, but to put it to work; to provide deeper insight, improve service, increase sales, and enhance profitability. Actifio’s copy data virtualisation makes data available when and where you need it, just as server virtualization did for compute in the current generation of data centers. In the data center of the future, that’s going to be a very big deal."
A total of $75m of the funding was closed on March 14, with the remainder committed to the company by April 7, 2014.