Nasuni Raises New $25 Million Funding Round

“We love cash and having a strong balance sheet. But anything to help with orchestration in the cloud is gold to us. We are considering perhaps acquiring this technology rather than building it because everything is moving so fast,” says Nasuni founder and CTO Andres Rodriguez.

Cloud file storage technology developer Nasuni Tuesday said it had raised a new $25 million round of funding and a new $15 million debt facility despite not yet having started spending the money raised in its last round of funding.

Nasuni, which in February 2019 closed its latest round of funding to the tune of $25 million, wants to show it has a strong financial background, said Andres Rodriguez, founder and CTO of the Boston-based company.

[Related: Nasuni Founder: COVID-19 Accelerating Move To Cloud-Only]

“This is an opportunity to get all our programs up to speed,” Rodriguez told CRN. ”We‘re strong with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services and ramping up for Google for next year. We feel everything is going to the cloud. We want to be on every path for people looking get to the big three cloud providers. It is important to ramp up education and partner training to make that happen.”

There‘s a certain amount of comfort in knowing that one’s partners have a strong war chest, said Juan Orlandini, chief architect at Insight Enterprises, a Tempe, Ariz.-based solution provider that has worked with Nasuni for several years.

“We do due diligence on any products we sell,” Orlandini told CRN. ”But all too often, we see great products come to market but disappear due to poor execution. Having a war chest doesn‘t change my mind on a company’s investment. But it gives me comfort that the vendor has the ability to innovate and invest as necessary.”

As customers feel the impact from the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, cash and a strong balance sheet become an insurance policy, Rodriguez said.

“It is something our clients look to see from us,” he said. ”We are critical to our client base. There is a lot of uncertainty. Having a good balance sheet keeps people calm instead of us having to scramble to get cash when it‘s needed. We feel a lot more secure.”

The new equity funding and debt facility were not specifically targeted at acquisitions, Rodriguez said. However, while Nasuni has yet to make an acquisition, the company is considering its options, he said.

“We love cash and having a strong balance sheet,” he said. ”But anything to help with orchestration in the cloud is gold to us. We are considering perhaps acquiring this technology rather than building it because everything is moving so fast.”

On the technology side, Nasuni Tuesday unveiled several new enhancements to its cloud storage offerings.

For the work-from-home movement, the company introduced Nasuni Cloud File Services for Microsoft Windows Virtual Desktop, which Rodriguez said couples cloud file storage with cloud-based virtual desktops at a lower cost than traditional file storage.

Nasuni also introduced new proactive detection and correction of issues at the edge, along with new active-active global file locking servers for improving remote file locking and file synchronization. The company also now supports Azure Ultra Disk and Premium SSD for improved performance for Nasuni file shares hosted in Microsoft Azure.

Also new is Nasuni Continuous File Versioning to allow data to be recovered quickly in case of a ransomware attack.

Nasuni has been a good channel-focused vendor partner, Orlandini said.

“It has all the right programs in place,” he said. ”It is a channel-first vendor, and it listens to the channel for input as to where to innovate. That‘s important. Their salespeople may meet with a few customers, but we’re meeting with thousands of customers. They’re taking the collective wisdom of partners like Insight to help all their partners.”