Box.net and Scality cloud storage get funded

Meritech Capital Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and more contribute to $55 million combined rounds

In an interview late last week with MOG CEO David Hyman, the gruff-voiced music lover called me out for my antiquated iTunes music listening habits: “You see, there’s this cool new thing that’s coming out. It’s called ‘the cloud’ and it lets you access files from anywhere.”
 
Thanks, David, I know how cool the cloud is.
 
Investors are taking note too. Two cloud storage companies, Box.net and Scality, raised a combined total of $55 million this week from institutional investors. Here are the details on both new rounds:

Box.net, providing cloud storage for the enterprise, raised $48 million in a Series D funding round led by Meritech Capital Partners, with participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Emergence Capital Partners and prior investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scale Venture Partners and US Venture Partners. Added to the venture capital funding is $10 million in debt financing from Hercules TGC.

Businesses can use Box.net to share and manage content online and collaborate on projects in real-time. It is intended to be a more elegant replacement to traditional FTP solutions.

Today, Box serves 60,000 companies of all sizes.

“Facebook, Twitter, Youtube [sic] and other social tools have reinvented how we think about technology and ignited a revolution in the enterprise,” writes Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO. “This is a revolution that is democratizing enterprise software – the cloud has dramatically leveled the playing field for the delivery of services, and for the first time, technology adoption in the enterprise is being driven by the bottom-up.”

The new funding round will be used to reinforce the service’s infrastructure, support all major mobile platforms, and improve synchronization and collaboration tools. Additionally, Box wants to continue to be a product that can be used by businesses of all sizes.

Cloud storage system provider Scality secured $7 million Series B round of funding led by IdInvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity). The company has raised $13 million to date.

Not just another cloud-based collaboration platform like Box.net, Scality focuses on storing unstructured content for large email providers. Scality RING, the company’s main offering, is supposed to be a scalable, decentralized storage system.

Part of the new funding will be used by Scality to add a sales and services office in New York. The company is currently headquartered in San Francisco.