Active Storage Completes $8 Million Series A Investment Round
Led by Intel to push its disk arrays for Apple environment
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on November 18, 2009 at 3:13 pmActive Storage, Inc. has completed its Series A funding round lead by Intel Capital with top-tier venture capital firms Mission Ventures and Valhalla Partners.
The company founders were previously executives at Apple, Inc. where they were responsible for Server and Storage products. Their flagship product, the award-winning Active Storage XRAID, is used in the production and broadcast of high definition television and movies by leading media production companies around the world such as NASCAR Media, Televisa and The Golf Channel.
"Our mission since our founding has been to create high-performance, easy-to-use storage for the world’s top media companies. Since our launch, even in a tough market, we have had record sales each month and we see incredible growth ahead for the increasingly Apple-based creative media markets", said Alex Grossman, CEO of Active Storage, Inc. "We are very excited to work with firms of the caliber of Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Valhalla Partners to build our next-generation products to meet the creative users’ evolving needs."
“Despite the market conditions we’re pleased to find a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial activity in Southern California. Active Storage is attractive to us as a local company not only for its technology vision but also for the team”, said David Ryan, managing partner at Mission Ventures, based in San Diego, California. Mission Ventures predominantly focuses on early-stage investment opportunities in software, I.T. infrastructure and tech-driven services segments.
“We welcome Active Storage to our portfolio and look forward to working with them as a new partner”, said Charles Curran, general partner at Valhalla Partners, Inc., based outside of Washington, D.C. “We believe that the media infrastructure segment is one of the few market areas that will continue to show enormous growth and be a strategic technology driver over the next several years, and we look to Active Storage to play a critical role in that development.” Mr. Curran has led or supported Valhalla’s investments in data storage including LeftHand Networks (acquired by HP), SEPATON, and Nirvanix.
Active Storage plans to use the capital for development of next generation products and to support sales and marketing efforts.
Comments
Apple never was a big actor in disk arrays, trying to design its own products and finally discontinuing its Xserve RAID. The company is now working mainly with Promise Technology, and also Highpoint Technologies.
There are many other storage companies offering subsystems for the Apple environment. They include Active Storage here, but also Atto, Condre Storage, DataDirect Networks, Data Robotics, Firmtek, Infortrend, LaCie, Nexsan and Winchester Systems.
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