Cleversafe Receives $31.4 Million in Funding

Cleversafe Inc. announced it has received $31.4 million in an extension of its series C funding from new and existing investors including Motorola Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), OCA Ventures, and clients of Anderson & Strudwick, Inc. As compared to industry averages in the recent PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree report, this level of investment far exceeds technology sector averages for Q3, reinforcing the market interest in the Cleversafe platform.

"This investment will assist us as we continue to grow and expand and take full advantage of organizations adoption of cloud computing as a normal course of business," said Chris Gladwin, president and CEO, Cleversafe. "We have seen very strong initial success with customer deployments so far, and with this continued commitment from investors, now is the time for us to scale our business and expand into the areas that most require a secure and massively scalable cloud storage platform."

The funding will be used to continue supporting Cleversafe’s growth, ongoing product development for the Cleversafe object storage platform, and further expansion into key markets such as government and public safety where storing sensitive data in the cloud is becoming more and more mission-critical.

"I believe Cleversafe’s compelling technology offers very high levels of security, scalability and significant cost savings compared to conventional approaches," said Reese Schroeder, managing director, Motorola Ventures. "We hope to leverage the Cleversafe cloud storage platform for our customers."

The Cleversafe platform is ideal for storing mission critical data because it addresses the core principles of information security – confidentiality, integrity, and availability – through its information dispersal architecture. This approach solves the security problems associated with Cloud Storage since it secures the confidentiality of data by transforming and virtualizing it to be inherently secure.

"The explosive growth in rich content across many industries poses major challenges for IT organizations that need to collect, protect, distribute, and archive all of these long lived digital assets," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage and IT Executive Strategies at IDC. "Investments in solutions like Cleversafe that allow organizations to safely store large volumes of data using cloud architectures will make it easier for companies to recognize significant CAPEX and OPEX savings on storage assets while also achieving a better ROI on their information assets."

Cleversafe’s Dispersed Storage technology, which has been in the commercial market for more than two years, seamlessly and securely transforms data into secure slices and then disperses these slices to multiple storage nodes typically across three or four data centers. Each individual slice is unrecognizable as data and therefore inherently secure because only a predefined threshold of slices are required to bit-perfectly recreate the original data. This storage-efficient approach has thin provisioning built in and eliminates the need for traditional replication, thereby reducing storage requirements by 50 to 70 percent when compared to traditional RAID with replication and yet has even higher availability than four replicated copies.