UPDATED 07:00 EDT / MARCH 25 2014

Actifio lands a cool $100M for data virtualization

funding_round_2014_0001Actifio announced on Monday that it has closed an oversubscribed $100 million financing round led by Tiger Global Management, a well-established private equity and venture capital firm notable for its investments in Zynga and Pure Storage. Existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, North Bridge, Advanced Technology Ventures and Technology Crossover Ventures also participated, bringing the startup’s total funding raised to $208 million—and pushing its valuation to $1.1 billion.

Five-year-old Actifio is working to address the little discussed but increasingly important issue of data copy sprawl. The challenge stems from the fundamental need to make the same data available for multiple processes, without having to worry about one application changing it in a way that may impact the performance of another. Historically, that required organizations to maintain duplicate files and systems, which is an inefficient use of resources that inflates infrastructure costs and increases IT complexity to the point of hindering everyday operations.

Ash AshutoshActifio offers an elegant solution to this problem in the form of a data virtualization product that, essentially, breaks information management down into the lowest common denominator, only keeping a single master snapshot that can be copied as needed. This approach drastically reduces storage requirements, simplifying management and slashing overhead expenses. “All these tools that are making copies of data follow the same set of fundamental data management policies: they all copy, they store, they move, they restore,” explained Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio, to Wikibon‘s Dave Vellante on theCUBE.

“The only problem is that they do these [operations] in individual silos,” Ashutosh continued. “So if you can bring all those silos together within a single platform and virtualize all the disk underneath, not only have you optimized the underlying infrastructure, but you also optimized your entire operation in the process.”

The technology is, unsurprisingly, gaining significant traction in the marketplace. Actifio recorded a 182 percent year-over-year bookings increase in 2013 that propelled it to more than 300 enterprise customers. The company also made 25 cloud provider partners, most recently teaming up with IBM to deliver an enterprise-grade, data virtualization service on SoftLayer.

Actifio said that it will use the funding to accelerate its growth, expand into new markets and double down on product development. In other words, the company is laying down the groundwork for its eventual public offering but, as Ashutosh told Re/code, that likely won’t happen before next year.

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Watch the entire video in which Wikibon‘s Dave Vellante interviews Actifio‘s Ash Ashutosh on theCUBE:

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photo credit: 401(K) 2013 via photopin cc
Video and photo of Ash Ashutosh courtesy of theCUBE
Suzanne Kattau contributed to this article.

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