$100m funding accelerates Actifio's virtualisation vision

Actifio, the copy data virtualization company, has secured an oversubscribed $100M funding round led by Tiger Global Management, LLC, with participation from 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 virtualized and Cloud IT architectures.

“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,” said Ash Ashutosh, Founder and CEO, Actifio. “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 mid-market.”

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 modernized to achieve these goals, IT organizations are increasingly challenged by the complexity and cost associated with data – the fuel of these applications – bound to a legacy, infrastructure-centric model. Over the last four years Actifio has delivered business transformation to hundreds of users worldwide with its pioneering information-centric data virtualization paradigm, enabling businesses to move faster, be more resilient, enhance agility, and leverage 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 highly restrictive, slowing access to information and rarely delivering on the service levels necessary for IT organizations supporting modern, always-on, agile businesses.

Actifio’s patented Virtual Data Pipeline™ (VDP) technology meets these evolving needs by enabling enterprise users and service providers to virtualize data management, and decouple their application data from their physical infrastructure. 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:

182 percent year-over-year bookings growth in 2013
Over 300 enterprise users worldwide
More than 25 cloud service provider partners with Actifio-powered offerings in production or in process, including IBM’s new SmartCloud Data Virtualization (SCDV), and Sungard’s Recover2Cloudsm cloud disaster recovery services
Customers in 31 countries, with 44% of total bookings outside the United States
Over 1 Exabyte of data, 14 Petabytes of active application data and 55 Petabytes of physical storage capacity under management
Global deployments across broad platforms including VMWare, Windows, Linux, AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, AS/400 and others; applications including VMWare, SQL, Oracle, DB2, Exchange, Sharepoint, SAP, and others; in over 25 vertical markets
36 patents granted, filed, or acquired.

“Over the last four years Actifio has transformed data from a liability to an asset in hundreds of major enterprises worldwide. Helping customers monetize, analyze, and share their data rather than just store redundant copies of it is the biggest positive disruption in the data center & cloud since server virtualization,” said Jamie Goldstein of North Bridge, Actifio’s original investor and board member. “Ash and the team have both thought big and executed with focus and customer dedication since our investment at inception. This round is just a reflection of the value they’ve built and the huge opportunity ahead.”

“Data is the currency of the modern enterprise. Its value – and its volume – are now growing at a staggering pace,” said Actifio Board Member and Greylock IL Partner Erez Ofer. “For consumers of storage, the reality is eerily similar to the server industry circa the early 2000s, when virtualization unlocked the potential of underutilized server infrastructure.”

“We’re at a turning point in the Enterprise IT market,” said Actifio Independent Board Member Jit Saxena, former Founder, CEO and Chairman of Netezza. “Customers know it, and are looking for a better way to manage their data in a world where IT infrastructure is increasingly commoditized, and data management is increasing strategic.”

“Actifio’s simple, elegant solution addresses the copy data problem with a modern architecture, allowing users to virtualize copy data the way VMWare virtualized computing power, bringing efficiency to data storage in the era of modern cloud-based computing,” said Actifio Board Member and G20 Ventures Co-Founder Bob Hower. “It’s a great team chasing a great opportunity, 100% focused on delivering great results to customers. That’s a formula for success.”

“Almost whatever you do, the data you produce doing it has huge value,” said Peter Levine, partner of Andreessen Horowitz. “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 virtualization 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.”

“By deploying the Actifio platform, users can access data when and where they need it, while collapsing the infrastructure, complexity, and cost of the 20th century data management model,” said Actifio Board Member Rick Kimball, Founding General Partner of Technology Crossover Ventures. “We think Actifio represents a transformational technology, and we’re glad to be a part of the story.”