YottaYotta Lands $26M

Yotta Yotta has pulled together a third round of financing totaling $26 million from banking, storage, networking, and software companies across the globe. The company, which is building a large capacity storage array and switch, plans to at least double this round by the end of the year. Investors in the round include: Banc of America Securities LLC, Noble Networks, Bombardier Trust UK of London, Davenport Capital Ventures, The Grosvenor Fund, Optical Capital Group, Morgan Keegan & Company Inc., Desjardins of Quebec City and TechnoCap of Montreal.

Given the current investment climate, YottaYotta is very grateful for any funding it has been able to get. This is a tremendous boost right now,” says Steve Mattioli, president and CEO of the company. The money will be used to ramp up marketing and development efforts as YottaYotta approaches its upcoming product launch, expected early next year.

The news isn’t the best for everyone though. YottaYotta’s number one competitor in the startup space, Cereva Networks Inc. has yet to find a much-needed third round. (see Cereva Closes In On Round Three).

"Cereva ended up with a first-mover disadvantage,” says William Hurley, information architect at YottaYotta. “Since they launched, the market has changed, CIOs budgets have been massively constrained... but by the time this happened Cereva had made a lot of noise about tackling EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and solving world problems, and these early moves have crumbled under the weight of their misguidance.”Cereva did not return calls by press time.

Hurley claims that YottaYotta doesn’t “do violence” to existing infrastructures, because it doesn't require users to rip out one box and replace it with another. “Our systems connect to existing storage arrays and SANs should the customer wish to build-up their storage network; the idea is to gradually move them over to a YottaYotta,” Hurley says.

More importantly though, YottaYotta has dropped its terrible company song, a suggestion made by Byte and Switch several months ago. But, it's come up with a new one and oh boy, it's a beauty. Check it out at new song.

— Jo Maitland, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch http://www.byteandswitch.com