Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Egnyte Raises Almost $30 Million for International Expansion Plan

Say what you will about the explosion in cloud services intended to help companies share and collaborate on files, but the demand doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Nor does interest from investors. Last week, Box, the IPO-bound file-sharing giant raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation. Now its smaller but equally enterprise-focused rival Egnyte is out today with a new funding round of its own.

Egnyte announced this morning that it has raised $29.5 million in a Series D, with investments from Northgate Capital Group, and new strategic partners, storage giant Seagate Technology and telecom company CenturyLink. Existing backers Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Polaris Partners also participated. Another major storage vendor that the company declined to name also participated in the funding round.

The new funding brings Egnyte’s total capital raised to just shy of $67 million. CEO Vineet Jain (pictured) told me in an interview on Tuesday that the new funding will be used to cover a big international expansion, and to make some strategic moves on the product front.

Where most companies in this space rely exclusively on the cloud, Egnyte, based in Mountain View, Calif., offers a “best of both worlds” approach. There’s a big block of files in a business that are too sensitive to let them leave the corporate firewall, but which employees often want to access from mobile devices while on the road. Egnyte’s answer to that is an on-premise appliance that sits behind the firewall and controls access to those files deemed sensitive. Less-sensitive files can go to the cloud.

The point is that you get the same file-sharing and syncing that you would with an all-cloud service, but with an on-premise component added to speed things up and keep things running, in the event that the cloud portion fails. It also gives an added layer of control and security when needed.

The company has been on the move this year. Revenue has been doubling year on year for two years in a row. In the fall, Egnyte used the headlines and concern about the overzealous spying by the National Security Agency to tout a “PRISM Protection” service, which surveys a corporate network and looks for instances of employees using less-secure cloud services. It also comes with five Egnyte licenses to try the service out. “This has given us a bit of a rocket ride,” Jain told me.

The company now has more than 40,000 customers and about 30 petabytes of data stored, with 20,000 of those on-premise appliances in operation.

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