SageCloud Raises $10 Million in Series B

SageCloud, Inc., in reliable storage systems for archival and backup data, has completed a $10 million series B financing, which will be used to accelerate deployment of the company’s products with initial customers and expand operations.

Braemar Energy Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investor Matrix Partners. In conjunction with the financing, Dr. Jiong Ma, partner at Braemar, will join the SageCloud board of directors.

Fueled by the growth in archival and backup storage needs and the increasing importance of big data analytics, the market for digital data storage is forecast to grow 60% annually in the coming decade. Moreover, industry analysts estimate that as much as 80%t of that data growth qualifies as cold data – data that is written once and infrequently accessed. SageCloud’s storage systems are engineered to address this problem, lowering the cost of storage while offering reliability and energy efficiency.

In a recently published report, Cold Storage is Hot Again – Finding the Frost Point, International Data Corp. identifies power management as a critical data center need and forecasts that the market for solutions to address energy-efficient data storage will exceed $25 billion by 2016.

SageCloud founder and CEO, Jeff Flowers, identified the emerging need for next-generation cold storage solutions as a result of his experience at online backup solutions provider Carbonite, which he co-founded and helped lead as CTO.

"SageCloud has developed powerful system software which leverages open-standards enclosures and economical commodity drives to optimize energy efficiency, drive sustainability and long-term data preservation for customers’ data centers," said Flowers. "In this way, we are revolutionizing the economics of data storage."

"SageCloud has developed a differentiated solution for extremely low-cost cold data storage that does not compromise on long-term data preservation and improves substantially upon existing solutions from an efficiency standpoint," said Ma. "Jeff and his team bring a demonstrable track record of success in previous ventures and a wealth of expertise in data storage. We are excited to partner with this world-class firm, which Braemar believes has a chance to disrupt the enterprise market for intelligent data management and storage."

"We’re seeing the potential for a big disruption to the storage industry coming from the disaggregation of software and hardware. Hardware prices are being driven down by open standard hardware (referred to as Infrastructure 2.0) and commoditized components," said David Skok, general partner, Matrix Partners and SageCloud board member. "Jeff and his team have spotted this opportunity, and created the software to allow enterprises and service providers to use this hardware for storage of their cold data at a fraction of the cost of other alternatives. Given the unrelenting growth in data that we’re seeing, we believe this has the potential to be a huge category."

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Majority of executives coming from Carbonite