July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Cloud startup SugarSync just closed an additional $3 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. 

A spokesperson for the company just confirmed the debt raise and said it would be used to bolster the product development team. The funding was brought in through an existing investor  – likely Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Andreas Stavropoulous, whose name appears on the Form D.

The company has not raised funding since February 2012, when it pulled in $15 million to grow and define itself in the crowded cloud storage market.

“This small cash infusion was from existing investors who were simply supporting our focus to continue to improve the user experience,” said the company’s CEO Mike Grossman in an email. ”We’re very disciplined related to what we’re delivering and who we are targeting,” he added.

San Mateo, Calif.-based SugarSync helps individuals and small businesses manage and back up files across multiple platforms, including PCs, Macs, and iOS, Android, and BlackBerry devices. Unlike its primary competitor Dropbox, SugarSync has grown organically through word of mouth.

The company would not confirm whether it will use the additional resources for an acquisition, but it’s certainly a possibility. Another competitive Box has made a few small strategic acquisitions of late — most recently, Crocodoc.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Energetic CEO Aaron Levie of Box today revealed that his company is prepping for an initial public offering in 2014.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Levie said a 2013 IPO would be a “long shot,” but he didn’t completely rule it out. The company had previously aimed to IPO in the coming months, and analysts predicted that it would be in a strong position to compete in the public markets.

2012 was a hell of a year for companies that target their products at businesses, rather than consumers. And as we reported, about 80 percent of companies that will IPO next year will be business-to-business (B2B). Likely contenders include SurveyMonkey, which raised $800 million today, Zendesk, and Hubspot.

With software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) vendors Workday and Splunk surging more than 80 percent since 2012 public-market debuts, expectations are high.

The company’s ample shareholders expect to see a return on their investment. Venture capitalists have poured a massive $284 million into Box, which began in 2005 as a college business project. The rapidly growing cloud storage provider competes with larger players like Dropbox and Microsoft.

In recent interviews with VentureBeat, Levie said that the role of the chief information officer is changing, and startups have an opportunity to compete with legacy vendors like Microsoft and Oracle. In recent years, the venture capital community has caught up. “In 2007 when we looked more into the enterprise, even Silicon Valley didn’t think we could win,” he said.

Levie revealed today that his company would be using its ample resources to hire staff and open offices in countries like Germany and Japan. He expects to add about half a dozen executives in senior management roles, including an international chief. According to Bloomberg, it expects to bolster its staff to 1,000 employees in the next year, up from about 670.

The Los Altos-based startup recently celebrated the opening of its London and San Francisco office.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

YouSendIt, the Campbell, Calif.-based startup that wants to do more than let users send large files, has made its latest strategic acquisition.

The company bought a venture-backed startup called “Found” (the founders are pictured, above) for an undisclosed sum. The technology lets users discover their files, documents, and data across a variety of devices and cloud services.

YouSendIt’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse aims to “go beyond send”, and help users access and manage their data. In an interview, he liberally uses the term “cloud-nogistic” to describe how technology should be able to cater to the full spectrum of providers, whether its Google Drive or Dropbox.

Garlinghouse said the corporate development team was tasked with finding startups to potentially acquire “that were thinking horizontally, not just vertically.” The company bought Found with a combination of cash and stock. They will retain the full team in their San Francisco offices, and will provide resources for the 5-person team to build out the product.

YouSendIt has raised a total of $49 million in venture funding in the previous seven years. According to Garlinghouse, they are experiencing 50 percent growth year over year, and recently exceeded 40 million users. Last year, the company pulled in $57 million in revenue.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Compute Engine has added 36 server instances to its cloud catalog and cut prices by 5 percent in a bid to compete with Amazon Web Services, the largest provider of cloud services in the world.

It’s still early days for Google Compute Engine, which has received the bulk of its signups and support from Silicon Valley tech startups.

We’re sure incumbent players in the space such as Rackspace and Microsoft’s Azure have been paying close attention as Google slowly reveals more details about the service.

Compute Engine provides virtual machines developers can use for hosting and storage. Google has data centers from around the world, so it makes sense to use them as sites to store data. The cloud infrastructure is considered to be reliable for businesses as it’s made of the same data center servers that power Google search.

“Google certainly has established themselves as one of the few companies in the world with an army of developers that can build massive-scale solutions at low cost and a network of data centers to host it at,” said Forrester infrastructure and operations analyst Andrew Reichman in a recent interview with VentureBeat.

Reichman predicted that a three-way battle of de facto standards would eventually erupt between “Amazon, Openstack/Rackspace/HP/Dell/IBM, and Google.”

Google’s previous entry level virtual server (3.75 GB of RAM and 420 GB of disk space) was priced at $0.145 an hour. It’s now $0.138 an hour. With the price reductions, cloud storage that was $0.12 for the first terabyte is now 20 percent to $0.095 per terabyte.

Google has been slowing building more muscle behind Compute Engine, its infrastructure-as-a-service offering since it was first announced during Google I/0 in June, 2012. Shailesh Rao, director of new products and solutions, told InformationWeek that the service will remain a limited preview for the time being.

Top image of Google IO Compute Engine demo // Sean Ludwig, VentureBeat