Nasuni Receives $25 Million Growth Equity Funding

Nasuni Corp. received $25 million in growth equity funding and saw a record-breaking year of revenue and customer expansion.

Led by Telstra Ventures, the round also included participation from existing investors Goldman Sachs, Sigma Prime Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Flybridge Capital Partners.

The new financing will further accelerate Nasuni’s go-to-market strategy, build upon the company’s growth in 2018 and fuel its expansion into new markets.

Telstra Ventures is the venture capital arm of Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company.

Steve Schmidt, partner, Telstra Ventures, said: “Application files, from documents and spreadsheets to CAD and creative files, are the lifeblood of most companies. However, traditional approaches to file management are prohibitively expensive and cannot keep pace with the growth of unstructured data. Nasuni offers a modern, future-proof alternative that decreases costs, eliminates the need for costly legacy systems and makes new levels of collaboration possible. Those are outcomes all enterprises need and want.”

This most recent funding round follows Nasuni’s $38 milllion funding in September of 2017 which was led by Goldman Sachs and brings the total funds raised to $145 million. 

With most of the $38 million financing remaining on the balance sheet, the additional $25 million in financing strongly positions the company to continue to take advantage of this massive market opportunity. 

Nasuni continued to deliver record revenue growth, including:
• Software subscription revenue increased by 52% year-over-year from 2017.
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) continued to accelerate, achieving a five-year compounded ARR growth rate of 66%, with an increase of 120% in the last two years alone.
• 4Q18 marked 19 consecutive quarters of positive subscription software revenue growth.

Nasuni provides a cloud scale software platform that combines the performance of an on-premise NAS with cloud economics by integrating with public cloud object storage providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Google and high-performance, on-premise solutions from IBM, Dell EMC, and Hitachi to deliver multi-cloud optionality along with global file sharing and collaboration. 

It offers NAS, backup, archive, remote office replication, and DR in a single platform that’s scalable.

CIO’s can now consolidate their legacy NAS and save up to 60% on hardware while their distributed teams can enjoy global file sharing and collaboration.  This is a new approach to file storage which has resonated with global customers such as AECOM, Cushman & Wakefield, Jabil, TBWA, Ulta Beauty and others.

“In 2018, we continued to experience phenomenal growth,” said Paul Flanagan, president and CEO, Nasuni. “And in addition to seeing record expansion within our current customer accounts we also signed market-leading enterprises in numerous industries.  At the same time, we are also making investments in our people, our product and partnerships that are the foundation of the great company that we are building.” 

Additional 2018 highlights nclude:
• Executive team expansion: Named Cheryle Cushion, an industry veteran marketer with a successful track record in helping young companies scale and accelerate their go-to-market initiatives, its new VP marketing.
• Product innovation: Introduced the first multi-cloud solution that combines primary and archive file storage and automatically reduces costs as files age – an innovation that eliminates the need for IT departments to constantly move files to less expensive, slower storage tiers. Cold files are automatically reclassified to a lower cost-per-terabyte rate but remain in the same location for analytics and can be immediately accessed by users if the need arises.
• Partner integration with AWS, Varonis and other leading companies: Achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Storage Competency status for primary storage use cases and is now an AWS Well-Architected Partner within the AWS Partner Network. Additionally, Nasuni now integrates with the Varonis Data Security Platform.
• Employee Growth: Increased its employee base 85% over the past two years and is currently exploring opening new office space in Boston metro-west with the intention of increasing its engineering team by 50% in the next 12 months.
• Facility Expansion: Opened a new office in Durham, NC to attract and hire engineering and customer support professionals with significant experience in mission-critical, enterprise technologies.
• Global Expansion: Nasuni Cloud File Services is now deployed in more than 6,000 locations across 70 countries. Significant growth also occurred in Europe, where the firm continues to expand and now has offices in Germany and UK. that serve representatives throughout the region. The vendor also established a presence in Australia in 2018 as the company began to expand into AsiaPac.
• Channel Growth: Continued to strengthen its go to market strategy and expanded its engagements with numerous partners throughout the world, including Ahead, Bytes Technology Group, CANCOM, CDI, COOLSPIRiT, CLOUDIO, Insight, Materna Information and Communications, MTI Technology, Nephos Technologies, RoundTower, Softcat, and Quorum. Notably, longstanding partners CDW and SHI continued to see growth in the number of customer engagements with Nasuni.
• Industry recognition: Was featured in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Hybrid Infrastructure Services, 2018 as a key vendor in the hybrid cloud storage category, the first point on the graphic representing the most innovative, ‘On the Rise’ technologies. Additionally, Nasuni Archive was named a TechTarget SearchStorage 2018 Products of the Year finalist in the backup and DR software and services category.