FilesX Founder Counts Blessings

Jacob Herbst, founder, president, and CEO of stealth-mode backup software startup FilesX Inc., was supposed to be on American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles on Sept. 11, 2001.

Thanks to Mike Beaudet, now VP of sales at FilesX, he just missed the plane that would ultimately smash into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Beaudet cancelled a job interview with Herbst on Sept. 10, causing Herbst to delay his flight to L.A. They rearranged the meeting for the next day.

"I am an Israeli and a veteran of three wars," says Herbst. "I have seen dead people and bullets flying, but that was as close as I ever felt to dying that day." He called Beaudet the morning of Sept. 11 to thank him for saving his life. Beaudet remembers asking, "I guess I have a job, then?"

Eighteen months later, FilesX is gearing up to launch the company in April and ship its product mid-2003. For now, Herbst's lips are sealed on exactly what FilesX is up to, but we did uncover a couple of interesting details.

"It's instant-restore software for disk-based backup, which will enable users to get at the data on these devices easily," says an industry insider familiar with the company's plans."They are a cool Israeli company that has figured out how to solve a big, universal IT problem on the cheap," says Steve Duplessie, analyst at Enterprise Storage Group Inc. He was unable to say anymore at this stage.

Disk-based backup products, enabled by low-cost ATA drives, have made it feasible to store vast quantities of secondary storage on disk, while providing much smaller backup-and-recovery windows than tape.

These hot new devices are being touted as the sweet spot in the market for backup products, as they are a way for organizations to reduce costs and increase productivity (see Data Domain Rakes In $9.3M, Avamar Kicks It to Disk, StorageTek to Punch Into Disk Backup, EMC Has Eyes for Huge Archives, Quantum Slips Disks Into Backup, and NetApp's Backup Plan).

Alacritus Software Inc. and Revivio (formerly Mariko Systems) are also targeting this space (see Who's Gobbling More Cash? and Rhapsody, Alacritus Do Backup).

FilesX, which has about 20 employees today, has closed $3.75 million in seed funding from Genesis Partners. Its headquarters are in Southborough, Mass., with R&D based in Haifa, Israel. The company expects to receive additional investment once it launches.Aside from the fateful start to this company -- which Beaudet says has made the employees at FilesX feel blessed from the start -- they have a strong leader in Herbst. Until mid-2000, Herbst was CEO and chairman of SANcastle Technologies Inc., a company he founded. Prior to that, he was a cofounder of Intelligent Information Systems Ltd. (IIS) (Nasdaq: IISL), which he claims he developed to over $100 million in annual sales in the 1980s. [Ed. note: IIS must be a real shadow of its former self, then. The company, which owns part of StoreAge Networking Technologies Ltd., reported $68,000 in revenue for the quarter ended June 30, 2002.]

Beaudet, meanwhile, was employee No. 61 at EMC Corp.