Enterprise data-as-a-service firm Actifio Inc. said Tuesday it has raised $100 million in new funding to accelerate growth on a valuation of $1.3 billion, giving the Waltham, Massachusetts-based company unicorn status for the first time.

The Series F round, its first capital injection since 2014, was led by Crestline Investors with North Bridge Venture Partners, 83North, Advanced Technology Ventures, Heritage Group, Andreessen Horowitz and other existing investors also participating.

Founded in 2009, Actifio applies virtualization technology to data management by separating data backup and protection from the storage infrastructure. The company’s Virtual Data Pipeline technology essentially creates a single “golden copy” of an organization’s entire data store and exposes it via application program interfaces to the people and applications that need it. It also allows customers to restore data to any point in time in minutes, a capability useful for companies struggling with collapsing backup and restore windows.

Actifio Chief Executive Officer Ash Ashutosh explained to SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE in 2016 that “the concept is like Apple’s Time Machine or Windows’ File History feature, both of which store incremental file snapshots.” That’s simple to do on the desktop, but “very, very hard to do at enterprise scale” and that “it’s about being super-efficient at capturing data, storing it, moving it and managing it.”

The company’s platform appears to have been well-received. While not naming customers, Actifio said in a statement that it has “continued sequential and year-on-year growth in attracting the world’s leading brands” including five of top 20 global financials, four of the top 10 energy companies, three of the top 10 healthcare providers, six of the top 10 service providers and four of the top 20 global retail organizations.

What is missing from the news is any commitment to an initial public offering, particularly given that Actifio is well past the point most venture capital firms would be looking for an exit. The company last said it was looking at an IPO in 2014, with a 2017 report noting that it was focused on profitability over a public offering.

An IPO in the next year or two is likely, however, as Chief Financial Officer Ed Durkin told CRN that “we don’t expect any more private capital raises” and that the new round “gets us to cash-flow-positive with plenty of cushion.”

“We are approaching a revenue run rate of over $100 million,” Durkin added. “That’s in line with the revenue of other companies that have had IPOs. We remain focused on growing the business but will take advantage of market conditions as they happen.”

Image: SiliconANGLE