Cleversafe Inc., the solution for limitless data storage, today announced that the company has secured $55 million in funding to support its growth momentum, achieved by its breakthrough technology's cost-saving solution for massive-scale, high-growth storage needs. This oversubscribed Series D funding round was led by industry leader New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from all major existing investors, as well as new investor New World Ventures. In conjunction with the financing, NEA's Managing General Partner Peter Barris joins Cleversafe's Board of Directors.

'There is a fast-growing hunger for efficient, cost-effective solutions to manage massive volumes of data, and Cleversafe's solution completely disrupts the economics of storage at a petabyte-scale,' said John Morris, president and CEO of Cleversafe. 'Our proven technology is displacing legacy boxes that were designed for yesterday's storage needs across a wide range of industries. What they have in common is breakneck growth of storage needs that were poorly addressed by old-fashioned products from EMC and others. There are thousands of customers like that and with this round of funding, we'll expand our coverage of the market so that we can reach many more of them.'

Cleversafe has more than doubled its revenue and number of customers in each of the last four years. In total, the company has shipped more than 200 petabytes of storage capacity - the equivalent of the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history in all languages, times four. Cleversafe's growth has accelerated in recent months following the appointment of Mr. Morris as CEO in May, with numerous customer engagements around the world, such as PhotoBox, also announced today, and an IP portfolio that has increased to more than 80 issued or allowed patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in support of Dispersed Storage® technology.

'Cleversafe is way ahead of the innovation curve in storage technology,' said Peter Barris, managing general partner at NEA. 'Today, the company is seeing demand for its cost-efficient storage solution from an entirely new class of customer across a growing set of verticals. This demand will only accelerate as an ever-increasing volume of data is generated, and there is no better time for a company with the right technology to step forward to solve today's business challenges. I'm excited to partner with John and his team at this pivotal time in the company's growth.'

Since the company's founding in 2004, Cleversafe has continued to make tremendous strides in technology innovation to deliver on the capabilities of dispersed object storage to solve hyper-scale digital storage growth. Most recently, the company has advanced combined storage and computation with Hadoop MapReduce, significantly reducing customers' infrastructure costs for separate servers dedicated to analytical processes. The company intends to continue its legacy of innovation and technology leadership by focusing on delivering higher performance solutions with multiple classes of storage to address more demanding customer workloads; more scalable solutions that ensure customers don't have to worry about outgrowing their storage system; and more interface options to make it easier for customers to take advantage of the benefits of dispersed object storage.

'Cleversafe has pioneered a new approach to storage,' said J.B. Pritzker, partner and founder of New World Ventures. 'We are excited to join John and the Cleversafe team as the company solidifies its market leadership and expands its customer base of world class organizations.'

With the recent infusion of capital, Cleversafe plans to extend its rapid growth and customer engagements, as well as expand into new vertical market segments. The company also plans to increase its product development efforts to deliver additional innovative solutions in conjunction with leading industry partners to help its customers continue to reduce the costs of storing data.

'We are seeing an accelerated rate of adoption for new storage technologies, such as object storage, as a result of the dramatic upside in data generation,' said Ashish Nadkarni, research director for storage solutions from IDC. 'Cleversafe's technology, which has a successful track record of storing and securing some of world's most valuable data, excels at a massive scale. It's clearly an opportune time for the company to accelerate its growth strategy, break into new market segments and expand geographically as well.'

About Cleversafe's dsNet

Cleversafe's dsNet object storage system protects both data and metadata equally and is inherently more reliable and dramatically more efficient than traditional RAID-based storage systems. By applying its unique Information Dispersal technology to slice and disperse data, single points of failure and centralized synchronization points are eliminated. As data is distributed evenly across all storage nodes, metadata can scale linearly and infinitely as new nodes are added, thus reducing any scalability bottlenecks and increasing performance and reliability. Cleversafe's unique approach delivers the powerful combination of analytics and storage in a geographically distributed single system, allowing organizations to efficiently scale their big data environments to hundreds of petabytes, and even exabytes, today.

About Cleversafe Inc.

Cleversafe has created a breakthrough technology that solves petabyte and beyond big data storage needs. This solution drives up to 90 percent of the storage cost out of the business, while enabling secure and reliable global access and collaboration. The world's largest data repositories rely on Cleversafe. To learn more about Cleversafe and its solutions, please visit www.cleversafe.com.