220% Year-Over-Year Growth for Symform

Symform, Inc. announced record growth of its Global Cloud Storage Network in 2012, expanding its worldwide customer-base to 160 countries (up from 46 countries in 2011), and increasing the number of files stored by more than 220% to more than 193 million files.

This network growth is the result of a momentous year for the company, which included introduction of a new ‘Bytes or Bucks’ pricing model, expansion of its executive team, product enhancements and industry accolades, and attracting $11 million in Series B financing from Longworth Venture Partners, OVP, and WestRiver Management.

On the heels of these 2012 milestones, Symform has extended its success into the early part of 2013. In January, the company announced a strategic investment from Second Century Ventures, the investment arm of the National Association of Realtors, as well as the appointment of Mark Ashida, a long-standing Symform supporter and former OVP venture capitalist, as the company’s new CEO.

 Ashida is a 25-year technology veteran who has held CEO and COO roles at several prominent start-ups, and serves on the board of numerous Pacific Northwest companies.

Prior to joining Symform, he was a partner at Olympic Venture Partners where he focused on investments in infrastructure, SaaS, networking and enterprise software. At OVP he was Symform’s founding investor and served on the board for four years. He has also served as GM of Windows Enterprise Networking at Microsoft Corporation, COO at InterTrust, GM at Intel Architecture Labs involved in the spinout of PassEdge, CEO of an early venture-backed WAN networking equipment company sold to 3Com, and involved as a turnaround of one of the earliest web measurement companies. He also was a partner at Braxton Associates, acquired by Deloitte & Touche, and leader of its West Coast Strategy Practice.

Mark currently serves on the board of directors for Avenda, DepotPoint, and Serus, and is a board observer to Lucid Commerce, CGI, Carbonflow and Collaborative Software Initiative.

He received his undergraduate degree from Pomona College and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

"As an original seed investor in Symform, I’ve seen the company execute on and exceed its growth projections year after year. We’ve just begun to tap into the tremendous opportunity for bringing cost-effective and secure cloud services to the Prosumer and SMB markets using our distributed approach," said Ashida. "These milestones, including financing and expansion of the executive team, have positioned the company to accelerate our growth into 2013 and beyond."

Company highlights from 2012 include:

• ‘Bytes or Bucks’ Pricing: announced a new pricing model, enabling customers to pay for unlimited Symform cloud storage and backup entirely with excess local drive space.
• Extended Platform Support: broadened the availability of its cloud storage offering to Mac and Linux users. Fedora, Ubuntu and CentOS distributions are supported. Symform also added new integrations for Synology and Netgear NAS devices.
• Leadership Team: added to the executive team, board of directors, and the creation of an advisory board. These appointments included CEO Mark Ashida; SVP of global sales, Bob DeSantis; and SVP of product development, Omri Gazitt. Constance Freedman, MD of Second Century Ventures, also joined the Symform board of directors.
• Industry Recognition: received nine prestigious awards over the past year, including Cloud Computing World Series Best Cloud Storage Solution, Washington’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, and most recently recognition of Bob DeSantis as a UBM CRN 2013 Channel Chief.