Thursday, September 8, 2011

Backupify brings in $5M in Series B round

By Rodney H. Brown

Backupify Inc., a company that offers cloud-based automated backup for online services like Facebook, has raised $5 million in a Series B round of funding from a roster of its previous investors.

According to a release from Cambridge-based Backupify, the new round was led by Avalon Ventures, and saw participation from General Catalyst and Lowercase Capital, all three of which were involved in the company’s Series A round worth $4.5 million last September. Backupify said in the release that it would use the new funds for further development of its technology, as well as “launching new services for other cloud management solutions and tools.”

As part of the new financing deal, Brady Bohrmann, managing director of Avalon Ventures, will join Backupify’s board of directors.

Backupify said in the release that it has grown its customer base to more than 175,000 total users. In February, the company announced it had added LinkedIn to the stable of cloud-based services for which it provides automatic data backup, joining Google applications, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

Last November, Backupify acquired the 20,000-person customer list of a Swedish startup, TweetBackup, that provides web-based backup services for Twitter accounts, for an undisclosed amount.

When the new financing and the Series A round are added to a seed round of $900,000 led by First Round Capital, with participation from General Catalyst, Betaworks and individual investors Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Andy Swan and Bob Saunders, Backupify has raised approximately $10.4 million since it was founded. That includes angel funding from Dharmesh Shah, CTO of Hubspot; Sean O’Leary and Sterling Lapinski, co-founders of Genscape; and Vik Chadha, co-founder of Glowtouch.

Founded in 2008, Backupify moved from Louisville, Ky., to Cambridge when it took in the Series A round.