Nasuni, a provider of cloud storage and file sharing services based in the Seaport District, received $25 million in growth equity funding. The round was led by Telstra Ventures, the venture capital arm of Telstra, one of Australia’s largest telecommunications companies.
The round, which was announced on Tuesday, brings the total funds raised to $145 million since the company was founded in 2009, and follows a $38 million round that Nasuni raised in September 2017—led by Goldman Sachs, which also participated in the most recent fundraising.
In a nutshell, Nasuni sells a software-only solution that integrates with the preexistent cloud provider (such AWS or Microsoft Azure), so that enterprise companies can take their unstructured data - currently located in data centers - and move it to the cloud. In this way, the company still gets easy access and high-speed performance, but also the infinite scalability of the cloud at about 60 percent less cost, CEO Paul Flanagan explained.
Flanagan said that the combined $63 million the company raised in the last 17 months will allow him to grow the engineering team by 50 percent over the next year. Currently, Nasuni has around 130 employees in Boston, with around 70 holding engineering roles.
"At the end of the day, we're a software product, and we need great software engineers," said Flanagan. One of the profiles the company would be interested in hiring is "people who are in the business of storing data and moving data," Flanagan said, out of companies such as Cambridge-based Akamai.
Before joining Nasuni as CEO in 2017, Flanagan spent ten years in venture capital; he got in touch with Telstra Ventures through the VC firm he co-founded, Sigma Prime Ventures. Plus, Goldman Sachs, one of Nasuni's investors, is connected with Telstra Ventures, which has presence not only in Australia but also in San Francisco and Shanghai.
"The investment in engineering allows us to expand use cases we can solve, new verticals we can go into, make sure we can capture those verticals and those use cases," Flanagan said.
Existing investors Sigma Prime Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners participated in the round. In addition to the Boston headquarters, Nasuni has offices in North Carolina and in the U.K., for a total of 220 people globally.
