Hightail Secures $34 Million in Funding, Total at $83 Million

File-sharing service Hightail, Inc. has secured $34 million in Series E funding.

The company will use the capital to execute growth initiatives ranging from international expansion to broader strategic investment opportunities.

The round was led by Western Digital Capital, with new investor Accolade Partners joining existing backers, including Alloy Ventures, Sevin Rosen, Emergence Capital, Adams Street Partners and Sigma Partners.

Hightail has received a total of $83 million in funding.

This new funding allows Hightail to take further advantage of the expanding cloud services opportunity, which is expected to reach $220 billion by 2020 according to research from GigaOm.

“This is a tremendous milestone for Hightail and we’re thrilled to have both new partners like Western Digital Capital, as well as our returning investors, on board,” says Brad Garlinghouse, CEO, Hightail. “In a market where valuation is clouded by ‘hype’ we continue to keep the focus on improving our products and strategic partnerships with companies who share our same vision.”

“We are pleased to have led this financing round and look forward to helping the company expand its cloud storage and collaboration platform,” said Mark Long, president, Western Digital Capital. “We believe Hightail is addressing an important and growing market opportunity and we’re excited to continue to support innovation and growth of the storage ecosystem.”

Hightail continues to be positioned to take advantage of the growth in this space with 67% of IT leaders looking to put collaboration in the cloud, according to Forrester.

The company recently announced its rebrand from YouSendIt to Hightail, which was accompanied by a redesigned experience for the more than 40 million global users that are using Hightail, including 98% of the Fortune 500 companies in 193 countries, across its website, desktop and mobile apps.

Hightail believes in a solution that allows customers to control, track and most importantly, find and manage, their content regardless of the cloud service and device being used, and doing it in the most secure way possible.

Hightail most recently acquired adeptCloud, a file sharing and collaboration company focused on security, control and privacy.

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Online file sharing Hightail, based in Campbell, CA, was founded as YouSendIt in 2004 by Ranjith Kumaram, Amir Shaikh and Khalid Shaikh. According to Wikipedia, afterwards there was a falling out between the founders. Within a few years, Khalid and Amir Shaikh left the company, while Kumaran stayed in a product management and marketing role. In 2009 one of the company's co-founders was accused of making denial of service (DoS) attacks on the website for the YouSendIt service between December 2008 to June 2009. The start-up got $250,000 in 2004 in initial funding from Cambrian Ventures, then $5 million in 2005 (series A), $10 million in 2007 (series B) and $14 million in 2008 (series C)and $15 million in 2010 (series D). With the new $34 million (series E), total investment is reaching $83 million. The company acquired several firms:

In 2011 Attassa, developer of Microsoft Outlook add-ons, and Zosh, iPhone app developer

In June 2013, Found Software, maker of Found for Mac, a service that allows users to find files and content on not only their hard drives, but also across various services.

Last September, Adept Cloud, a security-focused file-sharing service for hosting files inside a corporate firewall.