Cloud storage is far from being new.  Not in the consumer space where Dropbox and a few others rule, or in the enterprise.  Every last bit of potential has been extracted from this core concept, and now new players have some serious innovation if they plan on staying afloat in what has become an extremely crowded industry.

Symform is all about innovation, and fueling that is the reason behind its newly announced second round of funding. The series already hauled in $8 million from WestRiver Capital, OVP and WestRiver Venture Partners, and up to $3 million has been reserved for a potential fourth investor.

Erik Anderson of WestRiver is joining the board of directors, and a whole new advisory board has been announced as well.  Members include Jon Gacek, CEO of Quantum and DocuSign CTO Grant Peterson.

“Symform is a fundamentally superior way to store data in the cloud, and our continued strong growth and access to growth capital further validates how our technology is uniquely positioned to permanently disrupt the global cloud storage and back up market,” said CEO Matthew Schiltz.

Skyform operates on a freemium model that gives users 200GB of free storage to play around with, but that’s where the standard cloud service portion ends. The firm puts a big emphasis on keeping customers’ data secure in order to make its service viable for corporate clients, and adds an interesting little twist on top of that. The way the Cooperative Storage Cloud works is by enabling users to ‘exchange’ excess storage they may have in their on-premise servers for online storage from Skyform, creating a very cost-efficient trade-off for both parties.

The focus on data is becoming a very common thing among cloud vendors – NetApp’s latest launch from yesterday is only one example of this going trend.