Planning for IPO, Mimosa raises another $17M for electronic archiving

Corrected

Mimosa Systems, a startup that helps companies archive emails and other files, has raised a $17 million fourth round of funding. Mimosa calls the latest financing a “mezzanine round,” meaning it should be the last round before an IPO.

The kind of comprehensive archiving that Mimosa offers is necessary for the “eDiscovery” process — namely, the process of searching through a company’s electronic records. With the growing number of legal requirements for corporate record-keeping, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, there’s been a lot of money entering this field. Last June, for example, Automatic acquired market leader Zantaz for $375 million (although the startup’s founder and early investors didn’t see much of a payoff). Correction: The company that acquired Zantaz was Autonomy.

When we wrote about Mimosa a year ago, we portrayed the company as playing second fiddle to Zantaz, but the Santa Clara, Calif. startup seems to be doing pretty well for itself. It has raised a total of $51 million and has offices in Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, China, Australia and India. Mimosa recently moved beyond emails, attachments, instant messages and backup tapes and now says it can archive any file. Even more interesting, chief executive T.M. Ravi says Mimosa will make its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to third-party applications later this year.

The recent funding was led by Focus Ventures, with participation from existing backers August Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners, JAFCO Ventures and the Mayfield Fund.

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