Cloud Engines, the producer of Pogoplug today reported that it has raised $15 million from its new investors; Softbank Capital and Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners, along with existing investor Foundry Group.  The funds raised will be used to expand its global distribution of its Pogoplug service and devices.

“Pogoplug is positioned to become the de facto way that consumers and businesses connect to their home and office storage. Pogoplug’s capabilities are perfectly suited for integration with offerings from Internet service providers as part of a monthly fee,” said Ron Fisher, General Partner at Softbank Capital.

Daniel Putterman, President and CEO of Cloud Engines, informed that this financing will be used by them to accelerate worldwide consumer retail channel expansion and make their devices popular as well as easy to purchase. Further he said,

“The confidence we have received from the financial community reaffirms that the personal cloud category we are building is going to be a key driver in consumer storage technologies.”

This is a really big step towards the personal cloud movement. We’re going to see much of the trends that occurred in the enterprise cloud virtualization journey taking place on a consumer level. Private clouds of this nature are going to increase in relevance. We also saw some recent developments by Etsy as it raised $20 million and also revealed an experimental search tool called Taste Test.