As more businesses and consumers sign up to services that operate in the cloud, so more companies working in this space continue to get attention from investors. The latest is Sonian, a specialist in cloud-based archiving and search services, which has picked up a C-round of $13.6 million.
With the funding, OpenView Venture Partners becomes a strategic partner of Sonian. OpenView — you may recall — in March announced a new $200 million fund specifically for cloud and big data investments. Existing investors Summerhill Venture Prtners and Prism VentureWorks also participated, and this brings the total invested in Sonian to-date is now at $27 million. Worth pointing out, too, that one of Sonian’s other investors is Amazon, which participated in the company’s last round where it raised $9 million.
On the back of overall interest, trust and growth in cloud services, Sonian’s star has been rising. The company, which focuses on enterprise services, says that in each of the past two years its customer base has doubled — it now supports 9,000 businesses, covering such services as scalable storage management, regulatory compliance (key for companies in the financial sector, which, along with healthcare, is a key vertical for Sonian), and eDiscovery.
The company has also signed some other significant milestones, including the acquisition of Webroot’s Email archiving business in January, as well as partnerships with enterprise IT systems companies Tech Data Corporation and ISI. As for Amazon, Sonian runs part of its business over Amazon Web Services.
Sonian also says that the past four quarters, it has seen “record” growth in its business. In the wider market, email volume has grown 500 percent over the last decade, and the email archiving market — a key area for Sonian — will be worth $2.2 billion by 2014, according to Gartner, with cloud-based archiving services accounting for half of that figure.
Sonian says it will use the investment to expand the business and develop more features for its core archiving products:
“This funding, as well as OpenView’s operational expertise and support, will enable us to expand our current customer relationships, further build out our sales and marketing teams, and develop new solutions that help customers accelerate their move to the cloud,” said Jeff Dickerson, CEO of Sonian in a statement.
Scott Maxwell, OpenView’s Founder and Senior Managing Director, will join Sonian’s board of directors.