Cloud Storage Vendor Symform Reels In $4M In VC Funding

Symform, developer of a distributed network framework for data backup and disaster recovery for small and midsize businesses, closed a $4 million round of venture capital financing led by Longworth Venture Partners, the startup said Wednesday.

’Symform’s unique cloud storage technology puts premium value on commodity hardware residing in millions of business locations worldwide while giving IT resellers a ’must-have’ offering for their SMB customers,’ said Longworth Venture Partners' Nilanjana Bhowmik in a statement.

’We love Symform’s disruptive market position and we’re confident in its future success,’ said Bhowmik.

Bhowmik joins the Symform board of directors as part of the financing arrangement. OVP Venture Partners, the Seattle-based startup’s original investor, also participated in the funding round.

Symform targets SMBs with a novel approach to data storage that slices and dices data and distributes the pieces throughout a network of hosted storage devices at customer and channel partner sites. The secret sauce is a Symform algorithm that can reconstruct the data even if up to one-third of the network repositories go offline simultaneously, while not allowing any hosting customer or partner to reconstruct another’s data.

The upshot is a cloud-based storage and disaster recovery offering that Symform says is faster and cheaper than similar online services by an order of magnitude.

And the channel appears to agree. Since emerging from stealth mode in fall 2009, Symform has swelled its reseller partner ranks to nearly 1,000, according to the company. The startup released Symform Version 2.0 in June and expects to double its growth in 2010.