$77 Million in Funding for Upthere, in Cloud Personal Storage

Headquartered in Redwood City, CA, Upthere, Inc. announced the availability of its new personal storage service and application.

It has built a way to keep, find, and share a lifetime of files. It safely and privately stores files directly in the cloud, instead of keeping them on devices.

Upthere also announced $77 million in total funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Western Digital Corp., along with Elevation Partners, Floodgate Fund LP, GV, NTT Docomo Ventures, Inc., and Square 1 Bank.

This funding gives Upthere the momentum to advance its technology and provide its storage solution to customers.

“We built Upthere from the ground up to be the ultimate personal storage experience,” said Chris Bourdon, CEO, Upthere. “We can now live directly from the cloud instead of battling the limited space on our devices. With the cloud as our primary storage place, we can easily view, find, and share a lifetime of data from any device, anywhere.“

“Upthere solves a widespread capacity problem with current storage services,” said John Doerr, chairman, KPCB. “It is a new, ambitious effort to change how we save and share things in the cloud.“

Key features of Upthere include:

Upthere Home
The Upthere Home app serves as the window to everything kept in Upthere. It is designed to handle a lifetime of personal photos, videos, music, and documents. In order to make a lifetime of things accessible, Upthere automatically categorizes and groups files together for easy browsing. To find specific things, customers can type a few characters or tap on groups to filter down to just the relevant items. For example, tapping on dates in photos will zoom out to show a bird’s eye view of all photos organized by month and year. Tap again to zoom in on a set of photos.

Everything kept in Upthere is private by default. Since it’s already in the cloud, sharing is easier. No data has to move around, so friends see shared content instantly. Every share relationship is captured in a new organizing feature called Loops.

Instead of folders, Upthere uses Loops – a simpler, more powerful organizational tool. A Loop can include any file and any file can be in any number of Loops. Loops can be private, shared with others, or published through a web link. Anyone in a Loop can invite others, add content, and make comments. It is a way for small groups of friends and family to share.

UpOS
The Upthere core technology is a new OS called UpOS. UpOS is built to support an ever-expanding amount of content being created in different formats from different devices and services. It is an integrated set of technologies that spans device and cloud, connecting the two together to deliver a smarter storage experience. The cloud part reliably stores content and makes it ubiquitously accessible, discoverable, and shareable. On the device, the UpOS framework, embedded in the Upthere Home app, transparently performs operations directly to the cloud. By bridging cloud and device, UpOS makes it possible to treat the cloud as primary storage place, bypassing the limitations imposed by legacy technologies like backup and sync.

Upthere Home is available for Android, iPhone, Mac, and Windows (beta). Upthere is $4.99 per month which includes the Upthere Home app for all platforms, the Upthere service, and 200GB of storage. If more storage is needed, 100GB increments are available for $1.99 per month.

Unlike other cloud services, Upthere does not count shared against storage quotas. All new users may get started with a free three-month trial. A credit card is not required.