Actifio just announced a new round of financing for another $50 M for a total greater than $100M in funding.

Actifio, Massachusetts based technology firm, is taking advantage of two of the biggest mega trends in the technology business Software-led Infrastructure (SLI) and Big Data.  This explosion of big data and virutalization is creating new business and technical models using software to leverage value in data.

According to the Wall Street Journal “When data storage company Actifio raised its new $50 million Series D round, investors  valued the company at roughly $500 million. As high as that valuation was, it could have been even higher.”

“The company received offers at valuations that were 15% more than what it ultimately took for its latest round, but its management accepted this deal because it didn’t want the valuation to get too far ahead of the company’s own growth rate, according to Ash Ashutosh, Actifio’s founder and chief executive.”

According to sources in the capital markets, Actifo is positioning themselves for an IPO.  They have been hiring like crazy on the sales side to go after IBM and EMC.

My ANGLE:
Actifio core intellectual property sits on top of IBM which will make it hard for them to price compete in the marketplace.  The reason for taking a low valuation is that Actifio don’t want to price out an acquisition from IBM.  Given the product relationship to IBM technology IBM might be the only suitor which lends credibility to the argument that Actifio is looking for IPO but isn’t in a position to get there until they can get out from under the IBM shadow.

One area Actifio is postioned for is the big data marketplace and the impact of virtualization. With scale out open source driving a massive disruption a new class of storage might be viable. The trend is away from EMC and Oracle so if Actifio can capture that new scale out mission critical hyperscale market then an IPO will be very doable.

Here is our Breaking Analysis interview with the CEO of Actifio with Wikibon analyst Dave Vellante.