Panzura, the company that puts and manages enterprise data in third-party clouds, has netted $ 25 million in Series C funding, which it will use to set up and staff an Asia Pacific presence and to double staff over all. New investor Meritech Capital Partners took part in this round and Meritech managing director Paul Madera joins Panzura’s board.
Panzura CEO Randy Chou
“Our priorities are expansion all around but most importantly internationally. Last round we opened an office in EMEA and now will do so in Asia Pacific. We will probably double our team overall,” Ranajit Nevatia, Panzura VP of marketing, said in an interview.
Broadly, Panzura competes with companies like Nasuni, TwinStrata and StorSimple, which Microsoft purchased last year, all of which take business data and pump it into third-party clouds where it manages that data securely. But Panzura targets large accounts while the others focus more on small and medium businesses. Panzura works with Amazon Web Services, HP Cloud, Nirvanix and other clouds. “Our differentiator is our global file system that lets users at multiple sites share data at the same time,” he added.
The San Jose, Calif.-company was founded in 2008 by two Aruba Networks veterans Randy Chou and John Taylor. Customers include Dreamworks, the University of Southern California and an unnamed gaming company, Nevatia said.
Panzura delivers its technology either as a virtual machine or bundled with a 1u or 2u appliance configured with SSDs or disk drives.
This round brings total Panzura funding to about $ 58 million from Meritech and existing backers Matrix Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Opus Capital and Chevron Technology Ventures.
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