Amplidata Closes $8M Funding Round with Big Bang Ventures, Endeavour Vision, Intel Capital and Swisscom

New capital to accelerate company’s business growth and development

LOCHRISTI, Belgium & REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amplidata, an innovator in high-performance object storage technology, announced today that it has completed a Series C round of funding totaling $8 million from investors Big Bang Ventures, Endeavour Vision, Intel Capital and Swisscom.

“The additional funding will support further development of the sales and support organization in the US, Europe and Asia.”

Amplidata provides AmpliStor, an optimized object storage solution for “big data” applications. It enables customers to deploy petabyte-scale storage infrastructures that meet the highest availability and performance requirements at the lowest possible cost.

Unstructured data stored in public and private content archives represents 80% of the total data storage growth projected for the coming decade. AmpliStor addresses the needs for big data storage as it scales to multi-petabyte capacity and protects data with policy-driven durability to ten nine’s and beyond. Amplidata technology also provides scalable high throughput, which makes it suitable for the most demanding media applications. AmpliStor minimizes the required overhead in disk capacity and resulting power consumption in comparison to typical multi-copy cloud storage implementations. It also features data integrity assurance, and self-healing capabilities to further lower the total cost of the storage system by 50%-70%.

Amplidata’s BitSpread technology provides an ultra-high throughput implementation of erasure coding to optimize data healing and durability. This key component of the AmpliStor solution enables deployment in throughput sensitive applications in a wide range of industries such as Media & Entertainment, in addition to big data archiving applications.

“During 2011, Amplidata gained significant traction with digital media deployments and reference projects such as Montreux Jazz live video archive,” said Dominique Pitteloud, partner at Endeavour Vision in Geneva. “The additional funding will support further development of the sales and support organization in the US, Europe and Asia.”

“The demand for more efficient storage products has grown rapidly as data capacities have increased exponentially, placing data center budgets under pressure. With AmpliStor, customers benefit from the system’s scalability and performance while reducing the cost of storing data” said Wim De Wispelaere, CEO of Amplidata. “We are pleased that Big Bang Ventures, Endeavour Vision, Intel Capital and Swisscom have chosen to support Amplidata in this growth round. This investment will allow us to accelerate our business in worldwide big data accounts.”

About Big Bang Ventures

Big Bang Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund for high-growth information technology companies. In addition to providing capital, the fund’s team leverages its extensive operational experience and worldwide network to actively help startups accelerate their growth. Past investments include Avinity (acquired by ActiveVideo Networks); DataCenterTechnologies (acquired by Symantec); Dedigate (acquired by Terremark); Q-layer (acquired by Sun Microsystems) and Clear2Pay, a leading payments technology company. The fund focuses on the ICT sectors of enterprise software/SAAS, digital media and e-commerce, gaming, mobile applications, infrastructure software and storage. The team currently invests from its third fund, called Hummingbird Ventures. For more info, see www.hummingbird-ventures.com.

About Endeavour Vision

Endeavour Vision combines a team of experienced venture capital professionals who have collectively invested in over 80 companies in 12 countries in both the Life Sciences and Information/Communication Technology sectors for the last 20 years. The firm invests in early stage companies which have the potential to become global leaders. Recent investments in the technology sector include Kobojo, Quid, Amplidata, Paper.li, Spartoo and Retailo. For more information, please visit www.endeavourvision.com.

About Intel Capital

Intel Capital, Intel's global investment and M&A organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, mobility, health, consumer Internet, digital media, semiconductor manufacturing and cleantech. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$10.4 billion in over 1,212 companies in 51 countries. In that timeframe, 194 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 289 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2011, Intel Capital invested US$526 million in 158 investments with approximately 51 percent of funds invested outside the U.S. and Canada. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com.

About Swisscom Ventures

Swisscom Ventures is the corporate venturing arm of Swisscom AG – Switzerland's leading telecom operator. The group was founded in 2005 as a division of Swisscom's group level activities, and is focused on investing in early-stage growth companies with strategic relevance to Swisscom and its operating business lines.

About Amplidata

Amplidata launched AmpliStor, an Optimized Object Storage solution for big data in 2008 after a team of storage veterans had researched and develop the BitSpread technology over several years. The technology provides the highest storage reliability and performance at the lowest possible cost. AmpliStor scales beyond petabytes and requires 50-70 percent less storage capacity to protect data compared to traditional solutions.

The Amplidata team consists of storage experts who also helped to build the success of DataCenter Technologies, Dedigate and Q-layer. The development team is responsible for patent-pending distributed storage innovations.

Amplidata is a privately funded company that has received investments from Endeavour Vision, Big Bang Ventures, Swisscom Ventures and Intel Capital. Operational headquarters are in Lochristi, Belgium. US Headquarters are in Redwood City. Sales and support are represented in a number of countries in Europe, North America and Asia. More information can be found at www.amplidata.com.