Acopia Networks has closed on a $25 million funding round, one of the largest for a storage start-up this year.
The company’s third round of financing was led by new investor Goldman Sachs, with participation by previous investors Charles River Ventures, Accel Partners, STAR Ventures and Vesbridge Partners. Acopia has raised more than $65 million to date.
Acopia is one of a growing number of storage vendors focusing on unstructured data, or the data outside of databases that comprise as much as 80% of corporate data. The increased focus on regulatory compliance and disaster recovery have made companies eager to cast a wider net around their data.
“Acopia’s products immediately reduce the cost and complexity of managing the rapid growth of file data, while also providing a platform to deploy emerging and valuable ILM functions,” said Goldman Sachs vice president Peter Perrone, who called the company “a very attractive investment opportunity.”
“Our products uniquely solve the challenges of managing unstructured data at a global scale, which continues to be a priority for large enterprises,” said Acopia CEO Chris Lynch. “We’re gaining significant customer traction by being able to outperform clustered file systems using existing file storage infrastructure.”
Acopia will use the funds to accelerate its business plan and sales growth several months ahead of schedule.
“We see enough market opportunity and traction to accelerate our plans significantly,” said Acopia marketing vice president Brendon Howe.
The company isn’t releasing much information on sales of its Adaptive Resource Networking platforms, which in addition to managing global unstructured data, also simplify storage management and increase storage and server utilization.
The company is only releasing the names of two customers — Merrill Lynch and Warner Music Group — but Howe says the company has produced “very compelling numbers” in its first three months of product sales, with “a couple dozen kinds of accounts” and sales 38% above goal.
“This is a proof point,” Howe said of the funding round. “What we are claiming is real.”
