True Ventures Bets $2.35 Million On Syncplicity

San Francisco based Syncplicity, a startup who entered the crowded market of online storage and file synchronization service providers last April, has raised $2.35 million in Series A funding from True Ventures and other private investors, including technology industry veteran Frank Marshall. The announcement comes almost 10 months after the company raised $250,000 in seed funding from relatives, friends and some angel investors.

Like a plethora of similar services, you can use Syncplicity to store, share, backup and synchronize files from your computer to the cloud. But don’t put it into the same basket with services like Box.net and Dropbox just yet, warns CEO Leonard Chung. He refers to Syncplicity as an ‘online data management’ service provider and stresses that the service is capable of handling ‘active data’, by which he means files that constantly change or are being worked on by multiple people.

While there is some truth to Chung’s statements about being different from other solutions geared primarily towards consumers, I wonder if that is going to prove sufficient to convince businesses to adopt Syncplicity.

What does differentiate Syncplicity is the fact that the company’s open platform integrates well with web applications. The platform enables developers to extend their web applications directly to the desktop, creating seamless interaction between online applications and files stored locally on the desktop. Examples: you can sync your photo library between Facebook and Syncplicity, edit your images with Picnik straight from your file folders, and associate any text document directly with Google Docs, Scribd and Zoho.

For now, Syncplicity’s desktop client only works with Windows XP and Vista, but Chung promises a Mac-compatible version will be released in private beta before the end of this year. Syncplicity will remain in beta for now and offers a free account for anyone signing up, including 2GB of storage space and 2 computers to sync. Also, for every friend you invite you get an extra 100MB in storage in your account up to an additional 3GB.

The company also offers a paid subscription that runs $9.99/month or $99.99 for a year, which includes 40GB space and unlimited computers.

Wuala offers a similar service based on a peer-to-peer file storage and sharing system, and there is also some comparison with Dell’s Remote Access, HP’s Upline, Nomadesk and SugarSync.

http://www.syncplicity.com/Video/Flash/Sync_Sharing.swf