French Storage Startup Grabs $8M, Eyes US

French online storage specialist Steek has picked up $8 million in Series B funding to finance its expansion into the U.S.

The round, which included AGF Private Equity and Innovacom, brings Steeks total funding to $12 million and will be used to bring vendor's SaaS offering to this side of the Atlantic.

”At the moment we’re mainly focused in Europe, but we want to go into the U.S,” says Jean-Michel Gobet, Steek’s vice president of marketing communications, explaining that Steek has already built a data center in the Washington, D.C., area as part of this effort.

Based in Bordeaux, France, Steek sells online storage capacity as a software-based service, mostly to ISPs, which include the likes of Neuf Cegetel, NordNet, and Denmark’s TDC.

The vendor is now looking to replicate this business in the U.S., according to Gobet.”The Washington data center is up and running,” he says, adding that Steek is already in discussions with American ISPs, as well as looking for U.S. staff. “We need to establish a sales office and/or find a partner in the U.S.”

The vendor is also looking to extend its reach beyond ISPs into the mobile phone market.

”Today, we mainly focus on the storing data from PCs via the Web, but we’re expanding our focus to include phone data,” says Gobet, adding that Steek stores data for 15 ISPs at its two French data centers. The exec would not say how many Pbytes of data it handles, although he did confirm that Steek stores data from some 1.5 million ISP customers.

Steek currently has around 40 employees, although the vendor is looking to add 10 to 20 people to its workforce over the next 12 months, some of whom will be based in the U.S. “We need commercial and pre-sales people,” explains Gobet.

Such is the extent of the company's American ambitions, Steek even changed its name from Agematis last year. “It was a bad name to go into the U.S. with, to be honest,” says Gobet. “It was a difficult name to remember and spell.”The vendor will nonetheless face some stiff competition this side of the Atlantic and is up against photo-sharing sites such as Picasa and Flickr as well as online backup vendors Carbonite and Mozy, which was bought by EMC for $76 million last year.

Unlike Carbonite and Mozy, however, Steek will not sell its offerings direct to consumers and businesses, preferring instead to tap into service providers.

“If the ISPs don’t want to be eaten by Google, they need to address new services, and we can provide services for them,” says Gobet, adding that the ISP model is also more cost-effective for Steek. “Having a [consumer] brand is a lot of money, and the money we have is not to develop a consumer brand, it’s to deliver the right solution to ISPs.”

Steek was founded (as Agematis) in 2002 by Christophe Camborde, Yannick Lacastaigneratte, and Arnaud Roudsovsky, three former IT execs at French retail giant Carrefour. Camborde now serves as the Steek CEO, with Lacastaigneratte and Roudsovsky serving as the startup’s COO and R&D director, respectively.

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