Data Protection Appliance Vendor Actifio Scores New $50 Million Investment, Talks IPO

Data protection appliance vendor Actifio on Wednesday said it has received a new round of funding worth $50 million, and that it is in preparations to launch an IPO in the next couple years.

Actifio develops purpose-built data-protection appliances that manage backup, snapshot, business continuity, disaster recovery, test and development, analytics and other processes that create copies of production data.

The goal is the creation of a single copy of data that can be used by all those processes, thereby easing the management of backup data.

[Related: Actifio Looks To Simplify Storage Product Line, Channel Program ]

The company earlier this year introduced the Actifio 100T, a new storage appliance for midsize to enterprise accounts, which provides both scale-up, or the ability to add capacity, and scale-out, which increases performance as more nodes are added to the system. The solution scales to up to 2 petabytes of capacity.

It also unveiled the Actifio Gateway, an appliance with no native storage capacity that virtualizes storage capacity from multiple vendors into a single storage pool that scales to up to 8 petabytes.

With the new D round of funding, total funding in Actifio stands at $107.5 million, said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of the Waltham, Mass.-based storage vendor.

The large funding round helps Actifio prepare for a possible IPO in the next 14 to 24 months, which Ashutosh said is the next logical step for the company.

"In this market, a leader has to be a public company," he said. "There is a cachet about going public, and questions about future survivability go away."

Actifio could be cash-flow-positive by late 2013, but that has not been a goal of the company, Ashutosh said.

"We've constantly looked at, is profitability important or is growth important?" he said. "We're just a little dot on the market. So our focus has been on growth. Also, we've invested a lot in customer sat[isfaction]. That takes a lot of money. We're focused not just on growth, but also on happy customers."

NEXT: Actifio's Big Emphasis On The Channel

Ashutosh said the new $50 million in funding will be used to hire new people to help the company increase its enterprise reach, to improve customer satisfaction via new programs and services, and to continue building out its intellectual property.

About 77 percent of Actifio's 2012 revenue, and 84 percent of Actifio's business in the fourth quarter of 2012, came through solution providers who either worked directly with the company or through its distributor, Arrow. Almost all the remaining revenue came through service providers, Ashutosh said.

The company is currently recruiting solution providers with storage, backup and VMware virtualization experience in midmarket and enterprise customers, he said.

PUBLISHED MARCH 6, 2013