Cleversafe Raises $55M For Object Storage Service That Turns Data Into Tiny Pieces

Cleversafe has raised $55 million to invest in the expansion of its object storage business. This Series D funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from all major existing investors. The Chicago-based company now has more than $100 million in funding.

Cleversafe, used by services such as photo-sharing service Shutterfly, slices data into little pieces that are distributed to separate disks, storage nodes and geographic locations. The company’s algorithms reconstitute the granular pieces of data based on the customer’s query.

Cleversafe’s fortunes have bettered considerably as data has become increasingly complex to manage. Photos, videos, tweets, updates — they all add up. CEO John Morris said companies can manage pretty well with legacy storage systems until they hit the petabyte mark. Then the complexity increases as does the cost of storing the data on systems often meant for files, not digital objects.

Enterprise storage providers are starting to cannibalize their business in face of strong new competitors like Cleversafe. The new age of data means these older companies have to move aggressively with new tecnologies such as flash storage, which EMC has invested heavilty in the past few years.