History 2004: Financial Rounds of Storage Start-Ups

• Backup companies are highly appreciated by venture capitalist as demonstrated by Copan Systems, formerly Flow Engines, involved in MAID technology, which announced a $25 million 2nd round of funding, bringing its total to $39 million to date.
• CreekPath Systems, in SRM software, closed its 3rd round of financing with investments of $22 million, bringing total funds raised to $54 million.
• Diligent Technologies, spun-off from EMC, which holds 24%, closed a $22 million round of VC financing. This round brings total funding to $37 million. For the virtual tape software company, the fresh infusion of cash will help, in particular, with the development of a completely original software product.
• A developer of global namespace management for NAS, NeoPath Networks will have raised a total of $18 million since its inception in April 2002, with the addition of a recent 2nd round of $12 million.
• Siliquent Technologies has secured an additional $21 million in financing to help the momentum of the recent shipments of 4 and 10Gb/s NICs. 
• Avamar Technologies, a pioneer in D2D backup, has raised $15 million in its largest round of financing to date, bringing total funding to nearly $50 million over 5 rounds.
• Storage processor company Aristos Logic has completed a $12 million funding for its 4th round of financing, having now raised a total of $65 million. It’s last round, $20 million, dates only from last year.
• Spun-off from Siemens in 2003, CenterBoard has secured a 2nd round of funding, for the same amount as the 1st in 2003, $6 million, to accelerate the development of its Virtual Operational Data Store accessing to information across and beyond the enterprise as if it were a single database.
• Scottish start-up Infinite Data Storage has raised £2 million ($3.6 million) for its 4th round of financing. It previously raised £3 million in 2002, £2 million and £300,000 in 2000. The company recently signed partnerships with IBM and Belkin.
• Japanese Optware, working on a 1TB holographic device, has raised $3.3 million from existing investors including CMC Magnetics, Fuji Photo Film and Matsushita Electric Industrial. Previous investors include Intel and Memory Tech as well. Total funding is now $28.5 million.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 201 on October 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.