Ctera Raised Undisclosed Second Investment Round

CTERA Networks Ltd., in cloud storage enablement solutions, has closed a round of funding led by Venrock, with a strategic investment from Cisco and participation of existing investor Benchmark Capital.

Venrock partner Ray Rothrock will join CTERA’s board of directors.

2011 was a year of rapid growth for CTERA, culminating in seven consecutive quarters of double-digit revenue growth and reaching more than 100,000 business end-users, primarily in North America and Europe. The new round of funding will be used to accelerate the expansion of the CTERA team and address the worldwide market demand for the company’s solutions.

CTERA Networks bridges the gap between cloud and local storage, providing performance and end-to-end security. The company’s solutions accelerate deployment of cloud services and eliminate costs associated with file servers, backup servers and tape drives. Service providers and enterprises use CTERA to deliver services such as backup, cloud on-ramping, file sharing, folder synchronization, and mobile access based on the storage infrastructure of their choice.

CTERA’s cloud storage enablement suite comprises a cloud-side service delivery platform, cloud storage gateways and agents for servers, laptops and mobile – all with a unified management interface. This hybrid cloud/on-premises architecture combines LAN-speed access with the elasticity and resilience of the cloud. It offers native support for cloud storage infrastructure from vendors including Hitachi Data Systems, EMC, IBM, and others.

"CTERA is the ultimate enabler for both service providers and enterprises that want to leverage cloud storage in order to keep pace with the explosion of unstructured data," said Ray Rothrock, partner at Venrock. "The company’s executive team, with its impressive track record of capitalizing on market opportunities that stem from disruptive shifts in technology such as big data into the cloud, is deeply experienced in data management, security and networking. The company is accelerating its penetration into the small, medium and large enterprise. It’s a privilege to be their partner."

"As business users are drawn into unsecured consumer cloud services, enterprise-grade cloud storage is quickly becoming a must-have for service providers and enterprises," said Liran Eshel, CEO of CTERA Networks. "CTERA makes it possible for these organizations to create services that have consumer ease-of-use, enterprise security and choice of infrastructure. This recent round of funding, with Cisco’s participation, validates our cloud enablement strategy and will help us pave the way to faster, easier adoption of cloud storage."