With the new $26 million late-stage financing for disaster recovery and data management software provider, Zerto, businesses can now join the meta-cloud.
Zerto sells a virtualization service that businesses can use to port their data and work between private and public virtualized infrastructure.
Developing its technology since 2009, the Herzliya, Israel-based startup has now raised more than $60 million from investors including Battery Ventures, Greylock IL, RTP Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners and new investor Harmony Partners.
The company said it will use the new money to expand its global presence and develop new products bringing mobile workloads into virtualized environments.
Currently, Zerto counts roughly 380 businesses as customers with 100 managed cloud service providers like Terremark, KPN and Colt offering disaster recovery services using Zerto’s technology.
The company recently opened new offices in the UK and Australia to build out its international presence.
For Zerto, what began as a disaster recovery and storage tool has morphed into a broader offering as businesses move more and more of their data off-premises, and increasingly use hosted services to run applications. Now, with competition intensifying for web services, the ability to move among different service offerings is a competitive advantage, according to Zerto chief executive Ziv Kedem. “We’re seeing price wars in the cloud space,” says Kedem. “Businesses want to be able to move their workloads from cloud to cloud.”
Zerto has some powerful competitors, including EMC, where many of the company’s employees previously worked. Kedem was the CEO at Kashya, which EMC acquired in 2006. EMC actually sued Zerto in 2012.