Courtney Rubin

This Start-up Wants to Save You From Data Disaster

Axcient, which hopes to simplify data recovery for small businesses, has closed a $15.5 million funding round.

 

Axcient, which is attempting to simplify data backup and disaster recovery for small businesses, announced it has closed a $15.5 round of Series C funding.

The five-year-old start-up's aim is to make life easier for small businesses by being one-stop shopping for  storage, backup and disaster-recovery as opposed to your needing to cobble together a solution from multiple providers. Axcient sends you hardware about the size of a desktop hard drive, which you can set up in about five minutes. It then connects to Axcient's cloud, plus your network or hosting service. Cost: About $100 per month—more if you have a lot of data.

The business model involves no upfront costs for small businesses, no hardware or software to purchase.

"It's a simple, predictable monthly fee for our platform that enables SMBs to pay as they grow," CEO Justin Moore told MPS Mentor.

Some half of small businesses never reopen after a data Armageddon, but less than half of small companies have a plan if disaster strikes, according to a study released last month. 

Axcient's total funding is now $33.5 million. The company says it plans to use the cash infusion to triple the size of its marketing and sales team, hire more staff, and expand internationally.

The data backup field is crowded, but the company has received a raft of awards for its technology. Some 2,000 small businesses are using Axcient, according to TechCrunch, from small dental practices to VCs. The company claims its 2011 recurring revenues will grow roughly 400 percent compared to 2010, and by year's end will be managing two billion customer files and over 100,000 laptops and servers.

Moore, a serial entrepreneur, founded the company after an accident with a laptop at his previous company. Data recovery took a couple of weeks, and it wasn't all recovered. Axcient exited stealth mode in early 2009.

Have you tried Axcient? What do you think?

 

 

Inc. contributing editor Courtney Rubin was for five years a London-based staff writer for People magazine. Rubin, a former senior writer for Washingtonian magazine, has written for the New York Times magazine, Time, Marie Claire, and other publications. She is the author of The Weight-Loss Diaries.