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Revivio performance helps land $20.7M in second round
July 21, 2003 - Revivio Inc., a data backup equipment company in Lexington, has raised $20.7 million in a second round of funding. Investors gave the company a significantly higher valuation before investing the new money, said Ullas Naik, a managing director at Globespan Capital Partners, a new investor and the lead for the round. "The company has made progress," Naik said, "so it wasn't difficult to reward them."
Specifically, the company had met all of its technology development milestones on the $9.5 million it raised in the A round, said Kirby Wadsworth, vice president of marketing and business development for Revivio. Charles River Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Flagship Ventures all returned to invest in the B round. It also didn't hurt that Naik had previously teamed up with Chris Baldwin of CRV as well as with Bessemer to fund Pirus Networks, an Acton-based storage networking equipment company that Sun Microsystems bought last year for $182 million.
The Revivio deal took less than two months to close, and while that's a lot slower than in the back-of-a-napkin days of the late 1990s, by today's standards, it's light speed.
Revivio is developing what it calls a "time addressable" data storage appliance, which the company claims enables a businesses to back up and retrieve data in real time. Unlike conventional backup systems, in which all data is backed up at a specific time once a day, Revivio's gear backs up all data every second resulting in virtually no data loss at all. "If you have a failure at noon," Wadsworth said, "instead of going back to midnight, you push a button on our machine and we give you a picture of your data one second before the failure."
In addition, a company could look back to any point of time, depending on the level of granularity selected and the storage resources that have been allocated to the Revivio appliance. The system accomplishes this task by storing only the blocks of data that have been modified, Wadsworth said. "It's akin to an incremental backup," he said.
Chief executive Paul Lewis said a number of large companies are evaluating the product, but that Revivio won't formally release its box until later this year. The company will use the new money to continue adding features and functions to the product, and also to develop the infrastructure it needs to bring the appliance to market and to support it. But Lewis isn't going on a hiring spree. "We've been contacted by pretty much everyone Ñ headhunters, recruiters, you name it," Lewis said. "But we're hiring one at a time, the old-fashioned way. At this point, we're not using outside firms to assist us with that."
By Jeff Miller, Mass High Tech
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