Irish startup PutPlace has secured a further funding round and added to its board with a number of industry veterans. The round was a co-investment between existing and new investors as well as Enterprise Ireland. The actual amount was not released but I understand it takes PutPlace’s funding to date to well over a million Euros.
The new team is a strong one. Industry veterans Pat Lynch (a serial investor) and Michael O’Callaghan join the board. O’Callaghan, who is COO at Babelgum and was formerly with Oracle, becomes Chairman. They join PutPlace’s existing board members Joe Drumgoole (the founder, who previously headed up Engineering organisations at CR2, Cape Clear and Oracle) and Brian Caulfield, entrepreneur and venture investor. Caulfield has worked with Trinity Venture Capital, representing them on the boards of AePONA and SteelTrace. Software sector marketing veteran Katherine Lucey joins as COO.
Drumgoole also told me that the startup is now in the market for a biz-dev oriented CEO to take it to the next level, as he – being the founder – wants to focus on the core product.
The best way to describe PutPlace is that it puts intelligence around your files in the cloud and lets you store the actual files anywhere. That includes storing it with with PutPlace’s storage service itself, or on Amazon S3 or your own cloud storage service. The key thing here is that it’s not just storage – it’s tags, information, meta-data, etc – all the stuff that can’t be commoditised – just as hard-drive storage itself becomes a commodity.
Drumgoole has a view that most consumers are being swamped by their increasing amounts of digital content (photos, videos, general files etc), and need intelligence to navigate it, not just file storage. That makes sense to me. Drumgoole calls it a rules-based, set-and-forget “Digital Butler”, which kinda of captures the concept!