Mimosa Expands Data Management

Mimosa Systems Inc. said yesterday it had secured an additional $11 million in funding that will help the startup spread its email management message more broadly. (See Mimosa Lands $11M.)

The round was led by Jafco Ventures and included August Capital, Clearstone Venture Partners, and Lighthouse Capital Partners. The Series B brings the startup's total funding to $17.5 million since it was founded in 2003.

Mimosa's flagship product is NearPoint, a continuous data protection (CDP) software for managing email on Microsoft Exchange servers. Essentially, NearPoint applies CDP to email by creating an archive for Exchange. When disaster hits, IT managers can quickly retrieve folders, messages, mailboxes, and other Exchange elements, instead of hunting their way through whole databases using MAPI. (See Mimosa Covers Email.)

T.M. Ravi, Mimosa's co-founder and CEO, told Byte and Switch that, since launching NearPoint in May, Mimosa has racked up "many tens" of customers, although only a handful of these have been made public. (See UTLA Picks Mimosa and Mimosa Wins Email Deal.)

Tim White, director of information services at publisher eRepublic Inc., is one of these early adopters, and believes the startup is addressing a gap in the market. "There's a real need for their products," he explains. "When I researched this issue a year ago I didn't find anyone who is specifically doing this." By storing email attachments on a separate server, says White, NearPoint gets around the 16-gigabyte storage limit on the standard version of Exchange.For its part, Mimosa will use the cash to bolster sales and marketing operations, and add to the engineering team. Mimosa currently has a total workforce of 65 employees, although the CEO expects this figure to reach 90 within 12 months.

But when is the Series C round likely to be? "We dont really expect to have a round of financing anytime soon -- this money will take us well into 2007," says the CEO. This is also when the firm expects to reach profitability, he adds.

On the product side, Ravi is planning to launch the next version of NearPoint later this month. Enhancements, he says, will center on WAN support, manageability and offline data caching.

Ravi, a startup veteran who has also worked at Computer Associates International Inc., reiterated his longer-term goal of harnessing other forms of data. The Series B funding, he explains, will help Mimosa extend its technology to unstructured documents and files, not just email.

Although Ravi cites Symantec's Enterprise Vault product as a competitor, another startup, Storactive Inc., is also making moves in this space, along with Lasso Logic, which was recently acquired by SonicWALL Inc. (See Lasso Joins CDP Roundup, CDP: Calling It Right, and SonicWall Lassos enKoo.)Along with its funding, Mimosa also announced new hires today. Donald Gieseler joins the startup from Symantec as vice president of North American sales and Peter Skinner, the former CFO of BitPass Inc. and iXOS Software, is Mimosa's new vice president of finance.

— James Rogers, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch

Organizations mentioned in this article: