ONStor Scores $25M

When ONStor CEO Bob Miller got the drift of this year's financial markets, he and his management team decided to return to the VC well.

"Sometime in the very early part of this year, we saw that the financial markets weren't headed in the right direction for IPO," Miller says. "We want to make sure we can stay focused on our business and strong balance sheet."

ONStor has a commitment of $25 million for shares of preferred stock, deliverable in two tranches. The first, comprising $14.8 million, has been delivered; the rest will come sometime later this year.

This is the sixth round of funding raised by ONStor, and it brings the vendor's total to about $130 million. Investors include Foundation Capital, Velocity Interactive (formerly ComVentures), Mayfield, and Worldview Technology Partners.

The clustered NAS vendor will use the money for working capital. "We're using it to grow in three areas: sales, customer support, and engineering," Miller says.ONStor, which competes primarily with the likes of NetApp and Isilon, boasted 100 percent annual growth in 2007. Customers number over 400, and the employee roster has stayed static at about 110. Partnerships, once lacking, now include 30 VARs and 15 strategic co-suppliers, including Asigra, Brocade, Cisco, HP, IBM, LSI, Sun, 3PAR, and Xiotech, among others.

Will the vendor go for more funding later on? "That's not our intention," says Miller.

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