By Ash Ashutosh, Founder & CEO – This morning the Wall Street Journal broke the story that we raised an additional $50 million from some very smart people, to “advance our leadership position in the $44 Billion dollar global market for copy data storage.” It’s been an exciting few weeks for us, and I’d like to share a few thoughts on how it happened, and what it means.
First I’ll say we didn’t set out to raise another $50MM this quarter, or expect to have raised over $100MM in total by this point in our growth. I recognize that’s an enormous amount of money, and I’m humbled by the faith of the people who’ve invested it in us. This last round actually happened very quickly. It pegs our enterprise value up around half a Billion – with a “B” – which is a long way indeed from where we started just 3 years ago.
That this has happened is powerful testament to all we’ve achieved in the intervening time, and to the quality of the people who’ve achieved it… this amazing team of engineers, sales and marketing folks, service and support experts, and administrative professionals spread around the globe, of which I am very proud to be a part.
I want to thank each of you for making this happen, along with another group of people without whom this would not be possible: our customers. Customers of Actifio… thank you for helping to make this possible for us, for betting on Actifio even in advance of the recent torrent of marketplace recognition. In the end our success is a function of your success, and we remain every bit as committed (and more able than ever) to ensure that our products deliver the business results we promise.
I would also like to recognize the invaluable contributions of our channel partners in helping us reach this milestone. Nearly 85% of our business now flows through these partners, and it’s been a great pleasure for me watching their businesses expand as ours has. Our channel partner relationships will only become more important as we scale our business, and I am deeply grateful for their ongoing faith and support.
We’ll be using this capital to build our business exactly the way we’ve built it to this point: one happy customer at a time. You can expect us to invest more aggressively in accelerating the growth of our global go-to-market model, enhancing our IP portfolio, and developing new and exciting opportunities for customers to benefit from our radically simple copy data storage platform.
Beyond that, I value this investment for what it says about the market our technology was purpose-built to address: Copy Data Storage.
It’s remarkable, when you think about it, that a marketplace IDC now values at $44 Billion was hiding in plain sight, right under the noses of the legacy storage providers. You could argue they had the least incentive to uncover it, having built their businesses on selling within the data protection siloes they created, and on pushing more and more technology to mitigate the symptoms of a flawed, expensive, and incredibly complex architecture. More of them will follow us into this space now, I’m sure, and over the long run that will be good for Actifio, and good for the marketplace.
For today, though, I’d just like to say THANK YOU to the investors who’ve expressed their faith in us today, to the team that makes us worthy of that faith every day, and to the customers that make it possible for all of us to pursue the opportunity of a lifetime.
Thank you all. Now let’s get back to work.