LucidLink Raises $75M To Accelerate Data Collaboration Tech

‘We’re finding the line between aggressive growth and fiscal prudence. So because we’re so well funded, we have a path to profitability, but we’re measuring that against staying aggressive and keeping our foot on the accelerator to grow the business,’ says LucidLink CEO and co-founder Peter Thompson.

LucidLink CEO and co-founder Peter Thompson.

LucidLink, a provider of storage technology that allows real-time collaboration primarily for the media and entertainment industry and other heavy data users, this week said it has raised $75 million in Series C funding.

That new funding round, led by Brighton Park Capital and including investments from existing investors including Adobe Inc.’s venture capital arm Adobe Ventures, brings total investment in San Francisco-based LucidLink to $90 million, said CEO and co-founder Peter Thompson.

LucidLink is a storage collaboration platform, one that differentiates itself from other collaboration platforms, which are typically aimed at individual users or for messaging, Thompson told CRN.

[Related: Storage Vendors Evolve With The Times: 2023 Storage 100]

“We are focused on the teams who are collaborating, usually using a set of tools and a workflow,” he said. “The underlying data that is essential for that collaboration to take place until now had to be moved from place to place, depending on which tool is used, where your team is, and what part of the workflow it’s in. We are making it a lot easier, because we have a one single source of truth that any of these tools can use. And we’ve addressed the issues around the performance of the tool or the individual accessing those assets or that data.”

LucidLink’s primary use case is for collaboration, and in particular for making it possible for users in multiple locations to collaborate using the same data, said Harry Skopas, the director of media and entertainment solutions architecture at CineSys, a Houston, Texas-based solution provider focused primarily on the media and entertainment industry.

CineSys, which counts among its customers such names as Warner Media, Madison Square Garden Networks, BBC America, Time Magazine, and the Dallas Cowboys, has been working with LucidLink for years, Skopas told CRN.

Matt Timmons, CineSys’ senior vice president of media workflows, told CRN that remote collaboration has become the new normal. And LucidLink provides the technology that allows remote users to access just the data they need and not entire data sets.

“When you don’t need to necessarily download all your files locally like Dropbox or Google Drive does, LucidLink allows us to only bring in the portion of the file that you need to edit a portion of the file to work with increasing proficiency across the board,” Timmons said. “That is a huge differentiator with for LucidLink.”

Timmons said he was talking recently with a U.S. West Coast content creator with multiple contractors in Europe who said they may have to ship 10-terabyte hard drives or put the entire data on the cloud when the contractor may only need a portion of that data.

“We use LucidLink as a ‘Dropbox on steroids,’ Dropbox for a media-centric model,” he said. “To us Google Drive or Dropbox, you basically move the entire file.”

The fact that LucidLink can close a $75-million funding round is a big deal because it means resources for the vendor to provide the kinds of capabilities customers and partners need, Timmons said.

“We can talk to the sales team every other day,” he said. “But give me the engineers. Give me the architects. Because here are the real problems we’re facing here. And what I like about the additional funding is that there’s a few things that we’ve been pushing for from some of the APIs and things we need from a programmatic standpoint. Having additional funding, hopefully development resources will improve. So to me, it’s a good thing. It’s already a great product, but there’s a few things that they can do.”

Skopas said $75 million is a significant amount of money.

“And if it helps them dive deeper into product engineering and coming up with more robust, more various solutions, maybe more price models, I don’t know what their roadmap for that money is, but any money that that goes into the company to help further develop product that will make it better, easier, more efficient for us to deploy and help get our customers is great,” he said.

Thompson said LucidLink didn’t need the extra funding to survive, but instead raised it to accelerate its business growth.

“I’ve got friends who run companies where their runway was getting short,” he said. “They were in a position where they had to raise money, and they got a very different deal than we got. So I think that that was the rationale. The reason we did it is to accelerate. And the reason we are successful is because there just aren’t that many companies who are experiencing growth during these times.”

LucidLink is not yet cashflow-positive, but it could be, Thompson said.

“We’re finding the line between aggressive growth and fiscal prudence,” he said. “So because we’re so well funded, we have a path to profitability, but we’re measuring that against staying aggressive and keeping our foot on the accelerator to grow the business.”