Cloud File Services Developer LucidLink Closes $12M Funding Round

‘The bigger the file, the harder to store it or collaborate on it. We help companies solve their video edit issues. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen 10X growth. And the biggest cause was creative content,’ says LucidLink CEO Peter Thompson.

LucidLink, developer of the Filespaces general-purpose cloud file technology, has found significant growth in the creative content market and Wednesday unveiled a new $12 million Series A funding round that included an investment from Adobe.

The new round, which brings total funding in LucidLink to about $20 million, is less about developing the technology and more about developing new business, particularly with channel partners working with the creative community, said Peter Thompson, CEO of the San Francisco-based company.

“We’re doubling down on the traction we’ve had in the last 12 months in the creative content market,” Thompson told CRN.

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LucidLink’s Filespaces technology is a general-use NAS technology that allows cloud storage to be used with any shared workloads, Thompson said. However, in the past 12 months, video creation and remote collaboration have become the top use cases for the technology, he said.

“The bigger the file, the harder to store it or collaborate on it,” he said. “We help companies solve their video edit issues. In the last 12 months, we’ve seen 10X growth. And the biggest cause was creative content. We still offer general-use cloud file services, but we’ve focused our go-to-market on video content.”

Adobe, in addition to being a strategic investor in LucidLink, is one of the company’s cheerleaders, Thompson said. The two have been officially collaborating since last August.

“Adobe is quite heartily recommending LucidLink,” he said. “We have a number of joint channel partners, and we do joint calls and webinars. We are also in some of their virtual booths in trade shows.”

LucidLink has until recently focused its investment on the technology lift, Thompson said.

“Embedded file systems may look simple, but there’s a lot of engineering needed to make it fast and easy to use,” he said. “Now we’re more focused on the sales and marketing side, as well as on business development. We’re also hiring to get in touch with more ecosystem partners.”

LucidLink sales come via the indirect channel, and the company prefers to work with channel partners even when customers want to do deals direct, Thompson said. The company offers channel partners recurring revenue opportunities, he said.

“Our focus is on massively scaling in terms of number of files, number of users and performance,” Thompson said about plans for 2021. “We’re seeing rapid adoption in organizations with thousands of users. So we are looking at how to meet their needs. There will probably be a 2.0 release by the end of the year.”

LucidLink is also looking at an affiliation-type of channel program, Thompson said.

“We’re now focused primarily on systems integrator-type partners with a large media focus,” he said. “But that’s not a lot of partners. So we’re exploring opening to partners without as much experience in media workloads but who do have customers who need the technology.”