File storage and synchronization service Egnyte has raised $10 million in series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers with previous investors Floodgate and Polaris Venture Partners participating in the round. This brings Egnyte’s total funding to $16 million.
As we’ve written in the past, Egnyte is essentially a Dropbox-like service that focuses primarily on helping small and medium-sized businesses sync and store their files. The startup uses a hybrid cloud solution, where businesses keep a Network-Attached Storage device linked up to their office’s computers, which serves as a ‘local cloud’ — all files are synced and backed up on this local, network connected hardware. These Local Clouds can consist of Netgear Ready NAS devices, or VMware-based virtual appliances.
The ‘local cloud’ NAS is also hooked up to Egnyte’s servers so any changes made between the client computers and the files on the NAS are also synced up to the web for remote access. Once these files are in the cloud, company admins can enable file sharing between employees and also to business partners, who can be given restricted access to specific files. This cloud portion also serves as a remote backup, and files can be accessed from Macs, Windows, and mobile phones.
As more businesses move to the cloud for storage options, Egnyte has seen its customer base grow exponentially. The startup quadrupled its customer base in 2010 and is syncing more than 5 billion files with more than 500,000 user licenses. Egnyte is seeing than 2 million file operations in a single 24-hour window—an average of more than 3,000 file uploads and downloads per minute.
Egnyte, which faces competition from Sugarsync, Box.net, Dropbox and others, plans to use the new investment to expand into international markets and increase domestic engineering, sales and marketing efforts. The company also plans to launch an enterprise application for the next version of the iPad.