When a group of IBM Corp. veterans band up to tackle one of the most pressing operational issues in the enterprise, they are bound to attract investors’ attentions. And so it came to pass that Datos IO Inc. managed to secure $15.2 million in funding from two leading venture capital firms in the run-up to its launch out of stealth this morning.

Co-founder Tarun Thakur held senior positions at three major storage companies after his stint at Big Blue’s research division before establishing the startup a year ago and a half ago with Dr. Prasenjit Sarkar, a 15-year veteran of the company, and several other colleagues. They’re hoping to channel their experience with traditional data management systems into improving of the new generation of databases entering production today.

And in particular, the NoSQL stores where enterprises hold their unstructured information, which constitutes the overwhelming bulk of digital data. Yet much of that unstructured information is not nearly as well protected against loss as relational records, which is what Datos IO has set out to solve with its versioning software.

With general availability set for away 2016, the startup is revealing little about the offering besides its function, which is to make it possible for organizations to recover NoSQL systems after outages with minimum downtime. That functionality is currently lacking from MongoDB, Cassandra and many of the other non-relational systems that Datos IO targets with its platform.

The startup is also planning to add unspecified value-added features to the mix with the goal of enabling customers to make better use of the metadata from their NoSQL deployments, which contain valuable insight into operations. Datos IO wouldn’t be the first to try and make those insights more easily accessible, but its investors are convinced that its value proposition will manage to stand out.

The $15.2 million funding round announced in conjunction with the startup’s launch includes contributions from Lightspeed Venture Partners, True Ventures and a number of angel investors whose names were not provided. The two venture capital firms are each sending a representative to Datos IO, who are joining co-founders Thakur and Sarkar on the board.

Image via Geralt