Actifio Nabs $100M to Fight Copy Data
April 1, 2014 Alex Woodie
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Venture capital’s obsession with big data was on full display last month, with Hadoop leaders Cloudera and Hortonworks together bringing in $260 million in funding. But the VC love extended beyond analytics, as demonstrated by Actifio’s $100 million oversubscribed round of funding. Actifio develops a block-level object file system that centralizes a customer’s data, thereby eliminating the need to store multiple copies of data. Studies show that companies have between 13 and 120 copies of their data stored in various silos around the enterprise, including production, backup, data warehousing, development, and test. Large sums of money are spent managing, replicating, de-duplicating, compressing, masking, and encrypting this data for various purposes. As the data sets gets bigger (as they invariably do), the problems only magnify. Actifio’s solution to this dilemma is to virtualize the data and the access paths that applications use to get at it. Instead of letting each application create its own copy of the data, Actifio’s Copy Data Storage (CDS) software keeps a master copy of the data and “hydrates” it upon request. This approach can cut storage- and management-related costs by up to 90 percent, the company says, and as a side benefit, lets users recreate their data at any point in time. Last summer, the company announced native support for IBM i to go along with support for all the usual OS suspects. This approach is resonating with customers. The four-year-old Boston firm reports a 182 percent annual rate of growth in customer bookings, with live customers in 31 countries, more than 1 exabyte of data under management, and 36 patents in its portfolio. Those numbers are irresistible to the money men looking to invest in big data. To that end, Actifio’s $100 million round of financing was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from current investors, including North Bridge, Greylock IL, Advanced Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Technology Crossover Ventures. “Having shone a light on the $46 billion global copy data problem, we will use this funding round to expand our copy data virtualization 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 midmarket,” stated Actifio founder and CEO Ash Ashutosh in a press release. The light is bright for Actifio, which now has a valuation estimated at $1 billion. That’s double the valuation from a year ago, when it raised $50 million. RELATED STORY Actifio Supports IBM i with Copy Data Solution
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