Carbonite co-founders David Friend and Jeff Flowers have raised a second round of funding for their stealthy cloud storage startup called BlueArchive, bringing total funding to about $8.2 million. While there is little information available on the new Boston startup, its website indicates Friend and Flowers plan to compete with Amazon Web Services head-on.
BlueArchive disclosed on Tuesday that it has closed a new $6.2 million round, according to a Form D filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. This comes after the startup closed a $1.9 million round in May. None of the startup's investors have been disclosed, but the latest Form D lists 24 investors for this most recent round.
Friend declined to comment, saying he isn't ready to discuss BlueArchive yet.
In the title for BlueArchive's website, it says "High performance cloud storage at 1/10th the price of S3." That is likely in reference to Amazon S3, which stands for "Simple Storage Service." Amazon launched S3 in 2006 as a "scalable, high-speed, low-cost, web-based cloud storage service designed for online backup and archiving of data and application programs," according to TechTarget, which adds that S3 is designed to "make web-scale computing easier for developers."
If BlueArchive is aiming to provide similar services at a tenth of the price, that could make BlueArchive a very aggressive adversary of Amazon, which saw its S3 business grow 120 percent year-over-year in 2015. AWS altogether became a $7.3 billion business last year. S3 customers have included Dropbox, Tumblr, Formspring, Reddit and Netflix.
In Flowers' LinkedIn profile, he describes BlueArchive as a "large scale data archiving cloud service."
Friend stepped down as Carbonite's CEO in late 2014. While he and Flowers remain board members at their previous company, Friend ended his term as executive chairman in February.
