Actifio, the Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform company, today announced that it has raised $33.5 million in an over-subscribed Series C financing round. Andreessen Horowitz led the round and joins existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners and Advanced Technology Ventures in the new investment, targeted towards executing on the growth phase of Actifio. The investment signals a rapid shift in the data management and backup industry, away from traditional point tools used for backup, disaster recovery, deduplication, and business continuity that increase overall cost and complexity, toward the radically simple approach Actifio’s PAS platform represents. Peter Levine, a veteran enterprise IT executive and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has joined the Company’s board.

Actifio plans to use the funds to expand operations globally, increase awareness and capitalize on the rapid adoption of its PAS platform by managed service providers (MSPs), cloud service providers and those organizations grappling with the management challenges associated with Big Data. According to IDC, “Big Data developments will be perhaps the most critical new marketplace for storage solutions providers in the coming decade. Providing a strong portfolio of complete Big Data solutions – hardware, software, and implementation services – will be a high priority to succeed.”

With exponential growth in the amount of data being managed by organizations, companies are consistently struggling to ensure that data is protected and quickly recoverable to meet business needs. Actifio’s mission is to virtualize management of data and consumerize the operations to enable transformation of the data center into an SLA-driven services organization. Beginning with addressing IT’s most frustrating challenges (backup, disaster recovery and business continuity), the Actifio PAS platform is expanding to address test and development, analytics, compliance, e-discovery and other business-critical requirements, creating a new category of storage that efficiently virtualizes and manages copies of production data.

“We’ve watched Ash and his team at Actifio transform the company from an innovative startup applying virtualization to data management to a well-established market leader transforming data management into a virtualized service,” said Peter Levine, general partner, Andreessen Horowitz. “Actifio combines two core areas in which I have personally spent decades working in: data management and virtualization. By leveraging virtualization to break down backup software, Actifio is actually helping enterprises solve the problems associated with trying to manage massive amounts of data.”

Today’s storage systems are designed to support real-time production data and have been inefficiently used to store the copies for various business requirements. The Actifio PAS platform is optimized for managing copies of production data, eliminating redundant silos of infrastructure and data management applications. By virtualizing the management and retention of data, Actifio transforms the need for multiple data silos and point tools deployed for backup, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, analytics, and test and development— into one SLA-driven, virtualized Protection and Availability storage device that reduces costs by 10X. Because Actifio PAS instantly protects and recovers large amounts of data, there are zero backup windows, reducing any lag time and freeing business application servers from time consuming backup tasks.

“Virtualization and Cloud are at the core of IT transformation, and the time has come for businesses worldwide to benefit from introducing these technologies to data management,” said Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. “Over the past three years we’ve worked closely with our clients to help them drastically simplify their infrastructures and save millions of dollars by moving beyond their reliance on traditional point tools like backup software, replication, device-dependent snapshots, and others. This financing further empowers our team and clients to completely shift the way we think about traditional, legacy IT solutions and virtualizing the management of data – including eliminating backup software. This is a similar paradigm shift ushered in by VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and others, via server virtualization.”