CTERA Closes $25M Funding Round For Cloud Storage, File Sync And Share

CTERA, a developer of cloud storage and file sync and share applications, received a new round of funding to help the company ramp up its go-to-market strategy, which includes working with storage king EMC.

CTERA on Wednesday said it closed its Series C round of venture funding with an extra $25 million in the bank, taking the total amount invested in the company to $45 million.

While CTERA, as a private startup, does not discuss revenue and earnings, it is financially healthy, said Jeff Denworth, senior vice president of marketing for the New York-based company.

Related: File Sync And Share: Channel In Demand To Help Business Users

"Now we want to open the go-to-market engine," Denworth told CRN. "We want to expand worldwide and connect with as many partners as we can."

PAR 4 Technology Group, one of the company's partners, has found CTERA to be a very channel-friendly partner, said Chris Tedesco, vice president of managed services and operations for the Wakefield, Mass.-based solution provider.

"CTERA understands how to work with the channel," Tedesco told CRN. "And frankly, it's not annoying to work with. So many vendors can be very annoying partners."

Tedesco said the latest round of funding will make it easier for PAR 4 to bring CTERA to customers.

"It certainly legitimizes the intellectual property behind it to see that much money pour in," he said. "It's important to customers to know a company will be around for a while."

PAR 4 first got involved with CTERA about eight months ago after a customer asked the solution provider to manage its relationship with the vendor, Tedesco said.

CTERA's relationship with PAR 4's primary vendor, EMC, is also a huge plus, Tedesco said.

"CTERA works well with EMC's ViPR software-defined storage platform," he said. "The fact that CTERA is complimentary to our EMC business is important."

CTERA provides a collection of data storage services that sits in front of a delivery platform, Denworth said. Customers use CTERA to build solutions to provide enterprise file sync and share capabilities, backup or data center modernization, or as a way to manage their object storage requirements, often in partnership with other vendors, he said.

One common use case is for security audits looking for unsanctioned Software-as-a-Service applications like file sync and share which is not under IT control, Denworth said. "If it finds such SaaS, customers will need an alternative to shut down the unsanctioned service," he said. "CTERA gives them control."

CTERA works with multiple object storage technology partners, Denworth said. "We're the first fully-certified ViPR reference architecture for EMC and also work with Amazon S3," he said. "We're a strategic partner to both companies and to their partner communities."

PUBLISHED JULY 2, 2014