Actifio, a provider of Data Management Virtualization (DMV), has announced $8 million in Series A financing. The funds will be used to market Actifio's patent-pending technology which transforms individual data management application silos into a unified, virtualized, highly efficient solution for data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity.

This financing was led by North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. With the funds, Actifio will expand its sales channel, and invest in marketing to drive market share for its next-generation data management solutions.

Server virtualization technologies from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware, along with solutions from Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM and others have enabled the transformation of the computing infrastructure into an efficient, dynamic computing resource. However, the storage infrastructure continues to be a major bottleneck in this transformation, with data lifecycle management shackled by point tools that are deployed in silos - creating complexity, inflexibility and at a significant expense. Purpose-built to radically simplify and deliver unprecedented agility, Actifio's DMV technology reduces the real cost of managing the application data lifecycle and virtualizes vendor-independent physical or cloud-based storage devices into a private, public or hybrid storage cloud infrastructure.

"Actifio addresses a significant pain point for enterprises that need comprehensive data protection in a single solution," said Jamie Goldstein, general partner, North Bridge Venture Partners. "Actifio has all the ingredients for success including a hot market opportunity, technology superiority, and a stellar executive team that will allow Actifio to deliver on the promise of Data Management Virtualization."

"Traditional data protection tools have become a major management obstacle in the migration to dynamic data centers to realize the value of virtualization," said Erez Ofer, partner, Greylock Partners. "Actifio has the right team and technology at the right time to execute on a tremendous market opportunity for comprehensive data management that eliminates application silos and complex management headaches for the enterprise."

The newly funded organization has an all-star leadership team with deep-domain expertise in building successful companies and emerging technologies that deliver unprecedented value to customers and partners on a global scale. The Actifio executive team includes:

• Ash Ashutosh, president and CEO (formerly vice president & chief technologist of HP's StorageWorks division and founder, CEO and CTO of AppIQ and Serano Systems)
• David Chang, vice president of products (formerly founder and vice president of product management at AppIQ)
• Steven Blumenau, vice president of marketing (formerly vice president, digital archive sales at Iron Mountain; senior director of advanced development at EMC, and founder and CEO of Avalere)
• Rick Nagengast, vice president of sales (formerly vice president channel and partner development of EMC and GM of Storage Products Division of DEC and Compaq)
• James Pownell, customer operations manager (formerly founder and president of Exagrid Systems; founder and vice president of engineering Highground Software and development manager at EMC)

"The strategic investment by North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners is a strong validation for the company, our pioneering data management virtualization solution, and our ability to execute and capitalize on a multi-billion dollar market opportunity," said Ash Ashutosh, founder, president and CEO, Actifio. "Protecting business data should not have to be this hard, complex and expensive. Actifio's DMV technology brings to data lifecycle management the same paradigm shift that virtualization brought to the server environment with all the resulting simplicity and efficiency."