VC Spigot Still Flowing

Three small storage companies -- Incipient Inc., Silverback Systems Inc., and Atempo Inc. -- have pulled down a combined total of $36.2 million, a sign that venture backing of storage startups is continuing with relative strength into 2003 (see Silverback Lands $15M Third Round, Incipient Raises $15M Series B, and Atempo Picks Up $6.2M).

This latest crop of VC funding comes on the heels of the $66.5 million total raised last month by five storage startups: Aristos Logic, Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc., EVault Inc., LeftHand Networks, and LiveVault Corp. (see Startups Tap VC Reserves and Arsenal Restocks Its Coffers).

Incipient, based in Waltham, Mass., raised $15 million in Series B financing -- led by Jafco Ventures -- bringing its total funding to date to $25 million. Other participants in the round include previous investors Greylock and Sigma Partners.

The startup, which has around 50 employees, is basically developing storage virtualization software that runs in the SAN fabric -- on "intelligent" switches -- and it has been working closely with Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) (formerly Rhapsody Networks) to port its software onto Brocade's virtualization switch (see Rhapsody Works With Incipient and Brocade Reupholsters Rhapsody).

Incipient founder and CEO Ric Calvillo was also the founder of Conley Corp., acquired by EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) in 1998. Conley developed the multipathing software product now known as EMC PowerPath. At EMC, Calvillo served as general manager of EMC's Cambridge Software Center.Tony Rodriguez, Incipient's CTO, also hails from EMC, where he most recently was a system architect. At EMC he was working on "future technologies," which included a method of end-to-end integrity checks for database I/O. Prior to EMC, Rodriguez was CTO of CLAM Associates -- now, happily, called Availant Inc., a developer of high-availability tools for Windows servers.

Interestingly, EMC just announced that it will also be working with Brocade to develop new software for the Rhapsody platform. Could there be a mnage in the works among EMC, Brocade, and Incipient? Jeez... We're going to need a flowchart to keep track of this emerging sector (see Brocade Loads Code, Signs EMC).

Meanwhile, storage processor startup Silverback Systems also closed a $15 million third round of funding, bringing its total raised to $32.3 million. The round was led by previous investor Excelsior Venture Partners III LLC, a private equity fund managed by U.S. Trust Corp. All of the startup's previous investors -- Gemini Israel Fund, JP Morgan Partners, Newbury Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital -- also participated in this round.

Ron Kroesen, VP of marketing and sales at Silverback, says the funding is expected to take the company through to breakeven, sometime in late 2004 or early 2005. "We've got our first product out there and a number of folks engaged on it, but this will help us take the company to breakeven," he says.

He notes that Silverback expects to increase its headcount, which currently stands at 48, but "in a very focused way, primarily on the customer support side." The company, founded in July 2000, is based in Campbell, Calif., with an engineering facility in Rochester, Minn.Last week Silverback announced that its two-port IP storage chip was able to sustain 92,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS) over a single Gigabit Ethernet channel -- which, if it actually works in the real world, would make it faster than Fibre Channel host bus adapters (see Silverback Makes iSCSI Howl).

Finally, backup and recovery software maker Atempo announced it had raised $6.2 million in funding from investors including Banc of America Equity Partners, KBC Investco, Plantagenet Capital, and Vision Capital. Founded in 1992, Atempo has received $42 million in funding to date.

The 165-employee company -- formerly called Quadratec Software -- has "dual headquarters" in Paris and in Mountain View, Calif. Atempo's Time Navigator software is designed for service providers. The company claims to have more than 700 customers, including Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, Crédit Agricole, France Telecom, Renault, and Virgin Net.

— Todd Spangler, US Editor, Byte and Switch