Ocarina Closed $20 Million Series B Round of Financing

Ocarina Networks has closed a $20 million Series B round of financing led by JAFCO Ventures with significant participation from Series A investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Highland Capital Partners. As part of this transaction, Joe Horowitz, a general partner of JAFCO Ventures, will join the Ocarina Board of Directors.

Ocarina Networks provides the industry’s first solution to leverage patented content-aware compression and object deduplication technologies to reduce the space taken by online file data by up to 90%. As a result, Ocarina Networks can drastically reduce capital and operational expenses for businesses faced with soaring storage costs.

“This financing from some of the industry’s most respected investors is a testament to the large market for online storage optimization and the great momentum and leadership we have established,” said Ocarina Networks’ CEO Murli Thirumale. “Online storage optimization is one of the most important developments in the storage industry, and is fast becoming a ‘must have’ for anyone with growing storage needs and a desire to contain costs.”

Addressing a significant painpoint with high ROI,
and strong market demand
With its innovative technology, the company has seen strong demand driving company growth. Ocarina has also joined forces with a majority of the industry’s leading primary storage vendors to integrate or co-market its solutions. These Ocarina-enabled solutions seamlessly snap into existing storage systems and allow customers to store the same amount of data on significantly fewer disks, freeing up space for new files, and reducing capital expenditures without compromising capacity or performance.

The Ocarina ECOSystem has been deployed in some of the industry’s largest internet data centers and Ocarina Optimizers have shrunk over a billion files, achieving reduction across hundreds of data formats, while allowing these files to be served up in active online production data.

“In Ocarina, you have a solution that is helping companies scale storage systems to meet unprecedented data retention requirements while addressing an urgent need to reduce storage costs,” said Joe Horowitz, general partner at JAFCO. “Ocarina is one of a handful of companies that meets our investment criteria in today’s market: a company with real momentum, addressing a broad and significant market, and with a compelling ROI value proposition.”

While numerous companies offer solutions to optimize storage capacity for backup or archived data, Ocarina Networks’ solution is one of the only offerings to reduce the storage footprint of online file data, which is growing at a significantly faster rate for both large and mid-sized companies.

Ocarina’s patented three step ECOSystem — Extract, Correlate, and Optimize — is the world’s first content aware optimization technology to deliver a significant reduction in the size of the files that are driving the growth of online storage. These complex file types include email, photos, video, Microsoft Office, and industry-specific file types for energy, media, medicine, and genomics. The ECOSystem combines content-aware compression, object deduplication, and patented Ocarina information extraction algorithms to achieve better results than either compression or traditional sliding window dedupe alone.