Cloud Storage Pioneer Amplidata Closes €2.5 Million Series A Funding

The introduction of high capacity SATA disks represents a huge opportunity: CEO Wim De Wispelaere

Belgium-based Amplidata, an innovator in next-generation distributed storage technology for public and private clouds, announced today that it has successfully closed a first round of institutional funding, totaling €2.5M, with Big Bang Ventures. Amplidata provides unbreakable storage technology that is ten thousand times more reliable than current RAID based technologies, requires three times less storage and power and is thereby five times less expensive than current storage solutions.

The Amplidata Distributed Storage System fundamentally changes the way how data is stored. The company’s patent pending BitSpread encoding technology offers the scalability and ease-of-use of a next generation RAIN grid, creating a 10,000 times more reliable alternative to RAID. Through more efficient usage of power and raw storage capacity, Amplidata drastically decreases the storage cost. Amplidata easily scales up to tens of Petabytes.

The company is addressing some of the inherent weaknesses of high capacity disk systems, such as performance, bit error rates, mean time between failures and RAID rebuild times which have not improved sufficiently to keep up with the explosion of digital storage needs. Amplidata was in founded in 2008 by Wim De Wispelaere (CEO) and Wouter Van Eetvelde (COO), two storage veterans. They have been involved in the development and launch of several innovative products and technologies. Serial entrepreneur and high-tech visionary Kristof De Spiegeleer is the primary investor. Commenting on the new funding round, Kristof De Spiegeleer said, “It is a pleasure to work with Big Bang Ventures again. Our past successes have proven that they contribute a lot through their understanding of the market and experience in helping start-up organizations successfully expand.”

Wim De Wispelaere clarifies:

“After having booked our first successful deployments of the BitSpread technology, the BBV investment will allow us to ramp up sales and marketing activities across Europe and in the US. The introduction of high capacity SATA disks represents a huge opportunity to store massive amounts of digital data. But as RAID does not work on these, it requires a paradigm shift to build reliable and easy to manage storage systems with them. Amplidata BitSpread is the first to combine high reliability and scalability with high efficiency and performance.”

The trio De Spiegeleer, De Wispelaere and Van Eetvelde was previously successful with DataCenter Technologies (acquired by Symantec) and Dedigate (acquired by Terremark). De Spiegeleer also added Q-Layer (acquired by SUN Microsystems) to his track record.

Frank Maene, Managing Partner of Big Bang Ventures, on the talent of De Spiegeleer, “We have successfully worked several times with Kristof over the last ten years and I consider him to be one of the most driven and successful entrepreneurs that I know.” Maene sees very high potential for the Amplidata technology. “The Amplidata technology meets the three main requirements for storage in the age of cloud computing. It is the most reliable storage solution out there with the highest possible efficiency and it is ultimately scalable. They rightfully call it unbreakable technology.”

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A Cloudy Future for Networks and Data Centers in 2010

The message from the VC community is clear – "don't waste our seed money on network and server equipment." The message from the US Government CIO was clear – the US Government will consolidate data centers and start moving towards cloud computing. The message from the software and hardware vendors is clear – there is an enormous investment in cloud computing technologies and services.


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SpinVox sold for £64m (BIG LOSS...)

Troubled startup SpinVox - once a shooting star of the British technology industry - has been bought by an American rival in a deal worth $102m (£64m).

After a difficult year that saw substantial losses and unrest among its investors, it was today confirmed that the company - which converts customers' voicemails into text messages that they can read more easily - has been acquired by US technology firm Nuance.

In a statement Nuance, which makes the popular voice recognition program Dragon NaturallySpeaking, said it was buying SpinVox to help expand its reach into new countries.

"Around the world, the voice-to-text market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year," said Nuance vice president John Pollard. "With SpinVox's robust infrastructure, language support and operational experience, we will broaden the reach and capabilities of our platform."

The deal marks a heavy loss on the investments made in the Buckinghamshire-based company, which had raised more than $230m (£145m) in recent years to fund its ambitious expansion plans - and once valued itself at more than $500m.

While it boasted a legion of fans, however, the company had struggled to pay for major expansions around the world, while simultaneously fighting a series of claims that its automated voice-to-text technology actually relied heavily on call centre staff.

Over the summer, it rejected a BBC report suggesting that humans – not computers - transcribed large portions of customers' messages and held a demonstration of its system for journalists.

The increased scrutiny exposed a series of fissures inside the company, however. The management team, led by chief executive Christine Domecq, came in for criticism, and in August, recently-appointed director Patrick Russo – the former chief executive of telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent - stepped down.

With losses mounting, the company raised more funding in August – largely to service its debts – and began paying staff with stock, rather than cash, as a way to save money. But in September one of its backers, Invesco, wrote down its outlay by 90% and confirmed that SpinVox was up for sale.

Rumours of the Nuance deal were reported earlier this month, around the same time that the company was given more time to repay a £30m loan that had placed extra pressure on its finances. However, early suggestions were that the company was closing in on a $150m price tag - significantly more than the $102.5m deal that was eventually struck.

Investors in the company – who include Goldman Sachs, Carphone Warehouse chief Charles Dunstone and Peter Wood, the founder of insurance group Directline – will receive a total of £42m in cash for the acquisition, with the rest of the money coming in the form of Nuance stock.

Shares in the Massachusetts technology company – which had climbed by more than 50% over the past year - were down around 1%, to 15.97, on the news.

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The Largest Sale of Cloud Computing Company in 2009

Compuware’s $295 million cash acquisition of Gomez realized $93 million for Dolphin investors, a 770 percent return

Dolphin Equity Partners recorded one of the largest single returns for limited partners among venture capital investors in 2009 and the largest sale of a privately held Cloud Computing company with its fourth-quarter sale of longtime investment Gomez Inc. to Compuware Corporation (NASDAQ:CPWR), firm President Richard Brekka said at today’s annual limited partner meeting.

Compuware’s $295 million cash acquisition of Gomez realized $93 million for Dolphin investors, a 770 percent return. Dolphin was Gomez’s largest shareholder and first invested in the company in 2000, when it saw an opportunity to build on Gomez’s nascent Web-performance monitoring assets and its then-pioneering delivery via the Software as a Service model.

“Dolphin is committed to looking for long-term investment opportunities that have huge potential payoffs, especially among SaaS technology providers,” Brekka said. “With our hands-on approach to helping find and support the right management teams, we’ve been able to create some truly innovative companies that have delivered real returns for our investors.”

The Gomez acquisition is the latest in a series of increasingly high-quality exits for Dolphin portfolio companies over the past few years, including Enpocket (sold to Nokia in 2007) and MaxPreps (sold to CBS in 2007).

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Cloud AntiVirus Company Secures $2 Million in Funding

Immunet, developer of next generation AntiVirus technologies, announced today that it has raised $2 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Altos Ventures with participation from Atlanta-based TechOperators. Ho Nam, General Partner of Altos Ventures, has joined the board of Immunet. Immunet launched Immunet Protect, its first product, in August 2009. Immunet Protect is the first free, cloud-based antivirus application focused on protecting your community. Immunet Protect harnesses the growing power of social networks with its community sharing features and "Collective Immunity(TM)" technology to protect personal computers from virus threats.


Upon installing Immunet Protect, users immediately become protected members within the "Immunet Community" (at 20,000 users and expanding rapidly). The Immunet Community leverages the collective knowledge of threats gathered from its users to defend ALL members in real time against thousands of new threats created every day.

Immunet's defenses grow stronger with every new user that joins the Immunet Community. This provides users with a natural incentive to share the product through its community-sharing features, which use Facebook Connect, Google Mail, Yahoo Mail and regular email.

"Immunet Protect is unlike any antivirus software on the market because it is the first product focused on protecting an individual's own community," says Immunet Founder and CEO Oliver Friedrichs, a former Symantec and McAfee security veteran and entrepreneur. "Immunet Protect acts as a shield for entire communities, and that shield becomes stronger with each new user and each new threat that is detected. We want to spread the goodness of antivirus protection with Immunet Protect and allow our users to do so easily. We encourage users to 'Get Immunet Protect Before You Connect' "

"Immunet combines the collective intelligence of the Immunet Community with the power of social networks to create a powerful application that users have a common incentive to share for the greater good for all users," said Ho Nam of Altos Ventures. "We look forward to working with the Immunet team to support the viral growth of applications in the cloud AntiVirus space over the coming year and are excited to have them in our portfolio."