Symform Adds $11 Million Series B, Total at $20 Million

Symform, Inc. announced a Series B round of financing designed to fuel the continued growth and global expansion of the Symform Cloud Storage Network.

Led by WestRiver Capital Management, the series also includes full participation from existing investors OVP Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners.

The company has closed $8 million and reserved up to $3 million in the series to add a strategic investor in 2012, bringing the total Series B round to $11 million.

As part of the investment, Erik Anderson of WestRiver Capital joins the Symform Board of Directors.

This milestone comes amid another growth for Symform across customer accounts, global reach and data stored in the Symform cloud. Symform has active users in 138 countries, up from 46 at the end of 2011. In the first quarter of 2012, the company grew customer accounts by more than 100% quarter-over-quarter, while the number of devices and data files stored on the Symform network jumped by more than 50 percent during the same period.

Also Symform announced
the launch of an Advisory Board featuring:

• Jon Gacek, CEO of Quantum: He was previously CFO and COO of Quantum, following an acquisition of Advanced Digital Information Corp.p, where Gacek was CFO.
• Dimitris Achiloptas, professor of Computer Science at the University of California Santa Cruz: He moved to academia after a career in Microsoft Research. He is an expert in random formulas, algorithmic analysis and sequencing.
• Grant Peterson, CTO and VP Engineering at DocuSign: He has a track record of more than 15 years as a top engineering senior executive. Prior to DocuSign, he was VP of product development for LexisNexis and director of product development for Primus Knowledge Solutions.

"Symform is a fundamentally superior way to store data in the cloud, and our continued strong growth and access to growth capital further validates that Symform is uniquely positioned to permanently disrupt the global cloud storage and backup market," said Matthew J. Schiltz, CEO, Symform. "We have an amazing team of employees, investors and advisory board members who are building Symform into a global standard for cloud storage and backup."

With its Series B funding, Symform has now raised $20 million. The company is moving toward a global footprint while enabling its technology to be embedded or attached to on-premise storage devices and other IT solutions, providing a cloud-based data backup solution.

Symform is a peer-to-peer network for data storage, where users contribute excess local storage to the network in exchange for free or flat fee cloud storage. Analysts estimate up to 85 percent of local storage sits idle in most data centers and company networks.