Agami raising $50 million — for yet another storage company

November 20, 2007 | Matt Marshall | Comments | |

agami.jpgAgami, a Silicon Valley storage company with high-profile venture backing, is doing what any self-respecting company in the sector should do these days: Raise a large amount of money before the opportunity melts away.

The company confirmed to VentureBeat that it is negotiating to raise up another round of venture capital, with regulatory filings suggesting it could as much as $50 million. The company hasn’t completed the round yet. The company competes against an array of other storage companies, including some that have gone public recently, such as 3Par (coverage). Like 3Par, Agami offers products that are compatible with virtualization, which is hot within companies right now. Many of the public storage companies, such as 3Par, are losing money.

It’s a great time to raise money or go public because investors — VCs and institutional – are still feeling flush with cash. We’re in a time when lots of money is sloshing around; all that could change quickly if oil prices and the real estate credit crunch continue to take their toll on the economy.

The company has been secretive about its previous backing. It has already raised $64 million since 2003. This round will be its third. Previous backers of Agami, according to regulatory filings, include Kleiner Perkins, along with Advanced Equities, DAG Ventures, Apex Venture Partners, Alta Partners and New Enterprise Associates.

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Matt Marshall is editor and CEO of VentureBeat. Follow him on Twitter at @mmarshall, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • recoveringvc
    This is the restructured Zambeel that had already raised a boatload of venture funding earlier this decade.
  • $2,995 per terabyte?

    I bet Google does 1 Terabyte of storage, reliable storage using cheap SATA arrays.

    Nowadays you can buy yourself (retail price) $100 500Gb hdds. Say you create an array of 4 disks like this you got 2Tb for $400.

    If you replicate that 2 times more, that's $1200 for redundant 2Tb of storage, plug all of that with Sata over ethernet and you got cheap reliable storage.

    Now think of buying thousands of these disks in bulk, the price goes down considerably.
  • Bob Tucker
    What a total waste - these guys should just close up shop. When Agami (Zambeel) was started there wasn't much in the lower cost NAS segment (aka replication, snapshots, NFS, CIFS) - so possibly they had a business case. But now you can now get a much better product for free from Sun Microsystems using OpenSolaris and ZFS. Sun also just freely released their CIFS server.
  • Hello,

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