Is Nasuni Planning an IPO?

According to a MarketsandMarkets report published earlier this year, the global cloud data storage market is projected to grow 33% annually over the period 2014 through 2019 to be worth $56.57 billion. The researcher estimates the market to be worth $13.57 billion this year. The growth in the market is attributed to the continuing production of both unstructured and structured Big Data along with the need to allow for collaborative and remote working within an organization.

Nasuni’s Offerings
Natick, Massachusetts-based Nasuni provides such cloud-based storage services. Nasuni was founded in 2009 by serial entrepreneur Andres Rodriguez. Instead of being a pure play data storage provider, Nasuni offers storage as a service to their customers. Andres wanted to build a service where he could offer their customers a solution that was a cloud-based data storage service as well as a back up storage that can be recovered and replicated when needed.

Today, Nasuni offers this service and also lets organizations have access to data on the cloud while ensuring data security. Their enterprise storage solutions provide globally-distributed organizations with access to a simple, unified storage solution that integrates on-premise hardware with cloud storage and is able to deliver a secure, all-in-one data storage solution. The platform thus provides local performance for users, simplified and centralized management for IT, and an easily scalable, complete storage service for the global enterprise. Through their products, large companies are able to access secure storage services in a much speedier manner irrespective of the user’s location. Also, by successfully merging on-site appliances with cloud-based offerings, Nasuni is also able to reduce the total cost of ownership and increase the ease of scalability for the organizations.

Nasuni’s Financials
Nasuni charges their customers prices based on the amount of data space they are using and the services they would want to be deployed. They do not disclose financials, but in a recent article, Andres mentioned that they were on track to earn $10 million in recurrent revenue. Revenues grew 2.5 times in 2013. As of 2013, Nasuni had more than 100 mid-level enterprises as their customers.

They are venture funded so far with $53 million in funding from investors including Sigma Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Flybridge Capital Partners. Their latest round of funding was held in August this year when they raised $10 million from their three investors at an undisclosed valuation. Nasuni plans to deploy the new funds toward market expansion and product development.

Earlier this year, Nasuni hired Steve Boulanger, ex-CFO Care.com, as their CFO. They also added to their sales and marketing team by hiring senior executives at marketing and business development functions. The addition of senior executives is also leading to the speculation that Nasuni may be preparing for an IPO. Andres himself expects to go public in the next three years, which is much more reasonable.