Huddle pulls in $24M for cloud collaboration

Cloud collaboration, storage continues to ignite investors

Cloud collaboration software service Huddle has announced a $24 million round of funding. This series C round, led by Jafco Ventures with participation from DAG Ventures and previous backers, brings Huddle's total equity funding to $40 million.

Huddle’s last funding round, a $10.2 million Series B, was closed two years ago.

The London and San Francisco-based Huddle just recently opened a New York office in recent weeks. The enterprise service announced that its revenues have tripled each year since its 2007 launch and had four consecutive quarters of record growth last year.

Huddle is specifically targeting the biggest businesses -- such as Fortune 500 companies. 

A couple months ago, the startup launched Huddle Sync, an intelligent file synchronization tool that allows businesses to better work on the same documents across multiple platforms.

The new funding will help grow the 100 person staff to keep up with demand. 

Huddle competes in a similar space as Box for enterprise cloud storage and collaboration.

Other funding in cloud storage

Earlier this month, Nirvanix announced that it raised a $25 million Series C round. The new funding round was led by Khosla Ventures with participation from existing investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures, and Windward Ventures and is targeted to warded bringing more cloud storage options to the largest companies in the world. Nirvanix has raised about $70 million to date.

Nirvanix, which already service more than 1,200 customers worldwide, states that its fully-managed services with usage-based pricing is ideal for big companies that can't expect to keep track of how much data storage they need, and often spend money for space that isn't yet being used.  

Symform, a cloud storage and backup service, also recently raised $11 million in its Series B round of funding. The round was led by WestRiver Capital, with participation from existing investors OVP and Longworth Capital.

The Seattle-based company offers businesses unlimited offsite storage and its global network encrypts, shreds, and geo-distributes data, for the high offerings of data security. Symform uses multiple different local hard drives to act as a collaborative data center, so that when files are uploaded, the data are chopped up into tiny pieces, encrypted, and sent to at least 96 different hard drives.

Eucalyptus Systems, an open-source cloud software maker, also raised $30 million in its Series C round of funding on Wednesday.

Currently, Eucalyptus offers its open-source software platform for free to anyone who wants to use it, but has also found ways to commercialize the product through partners and customer support. The company’s tech enables 25,000 “cloud starts” each year, and serves 20% of Fortune 100 companies in some respect. This includes work for Aerospace Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Plinga, PUMA, USDA, and USASpending.gov. 

In March, Cloud service consulting company Appirio raised $60 million for its Series-D round of funding.  This round was led by General Atlantic with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital and GGV Capital. The company has now raised more than $76 million.

Appirio is focused on accelerating cloud-powered business solutions so that companies can better integrate services from Salesforce.com, Google and Workday into their daily actions. 

Then, just a few weeks ago, a young cloud networking group, Pertino, Inc., announced its that it secured $8.85 million for its Series A round of venture funding. This round of capital was led with Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. 

Pertino, founded in 2011, is attempting to reinvent business networking for the cloud by building a system that is simple, secure and flexible based on business needs (especially businesses with limited IT experience, staff and funds).