Amplidata Closes EUR 2.5 Million Series A Funding

    LOCHRISTI, BELGIUM, May 28, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Amplidata, an innovator in next-generation distributed storage technology for public and private clouds, announced today that it has successfully closed a first round of institutional funding, totaling EUR2.5M, with Big Bang Ventures.

Belgium-based Amplidata provides unbreakable storage technology that is ten thousand times more reliable than current RAID based technologies, requires three times less storage and power and is thereby five times less expensive than current storage solutions. The Amplidata Distributed Storage System fundamentally changes the way data is stored. The company's patent pending BitSpread encoding technology offers the scalability and ease-of-use of a next generation RAIN grid, creating a 10,000 times more reliable alternative to RAID. Through more efficient usage of power and raw storage capacity, Amplidata drastically decreases the storage cost. Amplidata easily scales up to tens of Petabytes.

The company is addressing some of the inherent weaknesses of high capacity disk systems, such as performance, bit error rates, mean time between failures and RAID rebuild times which have not improved sufficiently to keep up with the explosion of digital storage needs.

Amplidata was in founded in 2008 by Wim De Wispelaere (CEO) and Wouter Van Eetvelde (COO), two storage veterans. They have been involved in the development and launch of several innovative products and technologies. Serial entrepreneur and high-tech visionary Kristof De Spiegeleer is the primary investor. Commenting on the new funding round, Kristof De Spiegeleer said, "It is a pleasure to work with Big Bang Ventures again. Our past successes have proven that they contribute a lot through their understanding of the market and experience in helping start-up organizations successfully expand."

Wim De Wispelaere clarifies: "After having booked our first successful deployments of the BitSpread technology, the BBV investment will allow us to ramp up sales and marketing activities across Europe and in the US. The introduction of high capacity SATA disks represents a huge opportunity to store massive amounts of digital data. But as RAID does not work on these, it requires a paradigm shift to build reliable and easy to manage storage systems with them. Amplidata BitSpread is the first to combine high reliability and scalability with high efficiency and performance."
The trio De Spiegeleer, De Wispelaere and Van Eetvelde was previously successful with DataCenter Technologies (acquired by Symantec) and Dedigate (acquired by Terremark). De Spiegeleer also added Q-Layer (acquired by SUN Microsystems) to his track record.

Frank Maene, Managing Partner of Big Bang Ventures, on the talent of De Spiegeleer, "We have successfully worked several times with Kristof over the last ten years and I consider him to be one of the most driven and successful entrepreneurs that I know." Maene sees very high potential for the Amplidata technology. "The Amplidata technology meets the three main requirements for storage in the age of cloud computing. It is the most reliable storage solution out there with the highest possible efficiency and it is ultimately scalable. They rightfully call it unbreakable technology."

About Amplidata

Amplidata was founded in 2008 by a team of storage veterans who developed BitSpread technology to build the first unbreakable storage system. Amplidata responds to the market's need by solving the problems traditional technologies face and guarantees ultimate availability on all storage tiers. Leveraging distributed storage technologies, Amplidata enables customers to build highly available storage infrastructures at significantly reduced cost.

The Amplidata team consists of storage experts who also helped build the success of DataCenter Technologies (acquired by Symantec in 2005) and Dedigate (acquired by Terremark in 2005). The development team is responsible for patent-pending distributed storage innovations. Amplidata has its operational headquarters at the Innovation Center in IT Valley in Lochristi, near Gent, Belgium. R&D are located in Belgium and Egypt, sales and support are represented in a number of countries in Europe and North America. More information can be found at www.amplidata.com.

About Big Bang Ventures

Big Bang Ventures is an early stage venture capital fund for high-growth information technology companies. In addition to funding, Big Bang Ventures leverages its extensive operational experience and worldwide network to actively help startups accelerate their growth. Past investments include Avinity (acquired by ActiveVideo Networks); DataCenterTechnologies (acquired by Symantec); Dedigate (acquired by Terremark); Q-layer (acquired by Sun Microsystems) and Clear2Pay, a leading payments technology company.
The fund focuses on the ICT sectors of enterprise software/SAAS, digital media and e-commerce, gaming, mobile applications, infrastructure software and storage. For more info, see www.bbv.be.

Contact
Wim De Wispelaere
Amplidata NV
Antwerpsesteenweg 19
B-9080 Lochristi, Belgie
Tel: +32 9 324 25 90
E-mail: [email protected]

Frank Maene
Big Bang Ventures
Hangar 26
Rijnkaai 98
B-2000 Antwerpen
T: +32 477 20 17 82
E-mail: [email protected]

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