Monday, January 9, 2012

SimpliVity, formerly SimpliVT, raises $5.75M

By Rodney Brown

Stealthy IT software startup SimpliVT Corp. has a new name - SimpliVity Corp. - and a new $5.75 million fundraise, federal documents show.

There were seven investors in the new funding round for Westborough-based SimpliVity, and the round is planned for a top end of $6.5 million, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The filing does not name the backers. While previous filings with the SEC never listed any related persons beyond founder Doron Kempel, noted in this filing as related persons are directors Bruce Sachs of Charles River Ventures and Kevin Comolli of Accel Partners.

SimpliVity has no website still, after two years of existence, but at the time of the companies most recent funding Kempel said that “We are a software company. Our intentions are to play in the IT infrastructure space, but things are very preliminary at this time and our policy is to remain in stealth until we have something more substantive to say.” That most recent round was for $9 million in September 2010. 

When it was known as SimpliVT, the startup took a $1 million tranche of a first funding round in October 2009 that was planned to hit $3 million, according to federal documents. That brings the total raised by the company in just two years to approximately $16 million.

When reached by phone, Kempel said the numbers were mostly accurate, and confirmed that Charles River and Accel were investors, but declined to say any more about what SimpliVity was doing.

"We are doing a good job recruiting the people we need and getting funding, and we are just heads-down developing," he said.

Kempel’s previous company, Diligent Technologies Inc., which he co-founded in 2002, was acquired by IBM Corp. in 2008 for an unspecified amount. Diligent made enterprise disk-based data protection software. Accel Partners was an investor in Diligent.