Revivio Revs Up With $25M

Revivio Inc. has parlayed an early stake in an emerging storage market into $25 million in new funding.

The Lexington, Mass.-based startup, which ships an enterprise continuous data protection (CDP) appliance, will next week announce the closing of its third funding round, bringing its total to $55 million since its October 2001 inception. Revivio will use the money to build a small sales staff as it tries to cash in on what analysts see as a growing market.

Revivios main competition in this still-nascent market comes mainly from fellow startups Alacritus Software Inc., Mendocino Software, and XOsoft (see Alacritus Debuts Continuous Backup, Mendocino Scores $15M, and XOsoft Turns Back Time).

Revivio has lined up early customers for its backup-and-recovery devices -- including the University of New Mexico and Forbes.com -- without a sales force. Senior VP of business development Kirby Wadsworth says Revivio will hire four or five dedicated sales people while also trying to build up a channel.

CDP products continually record data changes and store only the changes instead of the entire database. They also allow recovery from any point in the past instead of only at fixed points.Revivio’s CPS-1200 appliance that began shipping last October stands out because it is more geared for the enterprise than most competing products. Revivio, says analyst Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group., is "almost entirely focused on Oracle. That separates them from the other guys, who have Microsoft-based products.”

Another thing that sepearates Revivio is its hefty price tag: The CPS-1200 averages around $250,000. But Revivio and its VCs are betting that financial institutions and other companies that can’t afford downtime will pay the price.

"We have identified continuous data protection as one of the most exciting growth categories," says Andrew Healey, head of the technology private equity group at Nomura International, which led Revivio’s latest round.

Revivio may have to strike fast to stake its claim to the enterprise, though. The major storage vendors will get involved at some point. Sources say EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) and Veritas Software Corp. (Nasdaq: VRTS) are already working with rivals of Revivio to develop CDP products.

Microsoft also added buzz to the CDP space last September when it announced plans to ship a data protection product that does continuous backup this year, although Microsoft’s product is more aimed at SMBs than the enterprise (see Microsoft's Recovery Plan).Wadsworth says his company is well funded to make a push in the CDP market. “We have a significant war chest, and we’re in control of our own destiny." Does that mean Revivio will hire an army of sales people to make continuous sales calls? Not exactly. Wadsworth says the company, currently at around 55 employees, will grow slowly.

“We’re a post-bubble startup,” he says with a chuckle. “We only hire after we’re in desperate need.”

Besides Nomura, Revivio’s funding round included previous investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, and Eastward Capital Partners, and new investor Lighthouse Capital Partners.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch