Nasuni Closes New $25 Million Funding Round, Looks To Expand Engineering, Sales, Marketing Reach

Cloud file services technology developer Nasuni Tuesday said it received a new $25 million round of growth equity funding it plans to use to finance its engineering, sales and marketing activities.

The new $25 million funding round is the Boston-based company's first round in about a year and a half, following its September 2017 round, which brought it $38 million. Total funding in Nasuni, including the latest round, is $145 million.

The round includes funds from existing investors, and was led by Telstra Ventures, the venture capital arm of Australia's largest telecommunications company, Telstra.

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Nasuni still has the majority of its 2017 funding round on its balance sheet, and will use the new $25 million to add to that balance sheet, said Paul Flanagan, company president and CEO.

"This allows us to go after the market opportunity with more vigor," Flanagan told CRN. "It allows us to be more aggressive."

Nasuni develops technology that allows customers to manage their file data in the cloud as if it were on-premises, Flanagan said. He said the technology is similar to separating the software from the hardware capacity in the NAS appliances from top NAS vendors, and substituting the cloud for the hardware.

He acknowledged that several vendors are already offering software-defined or virtualized versions of their NAS appliances to work in the cloud. However, he said, Nasuni offers scalability and performance points other vendors find hard to match.

Nasuni is still not yet profitable or cash-flow-positive, Flanagan said. "The only reason we're not cash-flow- positive is that we're investing in growth," he said. "When you're opening new territories, you need cash."

That said, Nasuni has over the past couple of years reduced its cash burn rate, and expects the new funding to see it through eventual cash-flow profitability, Flanagan said.

Nasuni is looking to grow its engineering organization by about 50 percent, Flanagan said.

"By investing in engineering, we create new products, which lead to more use cases," he said. "And that lets us invest in sales and marketing to go after the new use cases."

For 2019, Nasuni plans to invest in strengthening its platform for making data on one cloud available to work with compute on another cloud, as well as for cloud-to-cloud migrations, Flanagan said.

Flanagan said not to expect Nasuni to become an acquisitive company any time soon.

"We don't have an acquisition strategy," he said. "We get offers. There are lots of smaller companies out there. We are open to looking at opportunities, but there's no concerted effort on our part."