Deal Radar 2008: Mimosa Systems

Mimosa Systems has designed a solution to archive and manage email, attachments, IMs and files so that companies can easily access historical communication. Its NearPoint software works with Microsoft’s Exchange servers, allowing companies to store emails inexpensively and organize them easily and efficiently. The search tool enables users to find a particular email or document from thousands of emails stored over many years.

Founded in 2003, Mimosa is based in Santa Clara, California and has offices in Munich, Germany and Pune, India. It was co-founded by T. M. Ravi, who is now the CEO. The company started out with $6.5 million in funding. In December 2005 Mimosa secured $11 million in a Series B round that was led by Jafco Ventures and included August Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners and Lighthouse Capital Partners. This was followed by a $17-million Series C round led by Mayfield Fund in April 2007. Finally, in May 2008 the company received $17 million of funding in a round led by Focus Ventures, bringing the total amount raised to $51.5 million. Previous investors August, Clearstone and Mayfield also participated in this round.

Competitors include Symantec’s Enterprise Vault product, Storactive Inc., and Lasso Logic, which was recently acquired by SonicWALL Inc. The company has earned several awards and recognitions, including CRN Top 5 “Storage Standouts”. In April 2007, Mimosa was selected as a Red Herring Top 100 Innovation Finalist from a pool of over 800 companies. Customers include Washington State University, Sears Roebuck and Bank of America Securities.

An article on MicrosoftStartUpZone discusses how Mimosa experienced triple-digit revenue growth in 2007, though revenue details are largely undisclosed. In late 2007, the company sealed 98 deals, one of which with a large healthcare company that bought NearPoint for 87,000 users and is expected to add users in the near future.

Ravi said in an article on Archiving101.com that the company is generating plenty of cash and is aiming to go public in a few years, probably by 2010. Until then, as a company in a fast-growing sector like storage management, and aided by the tyranny of Sarbanes Oxley, Mimosa will have opportunities for good growth.

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2008