Amplidata Closes $6m Funding Round; Sees Big Future for Unbreakable Storage

LOCHRISTI, BELGIUM, September 17, 2010 (Press-News.org) Amplidata has completed a $6m funding round with investors Big Bang Ventures, Endeavour Vision and Swisscom Ventures.

Amplidata provides unbreakable storage for use in high-availability, corporate or cloud data storage infrastructures. "We see that this market is accelerating rapidly," says Wim De Wispelaere, CEO and co-founder, "and the support of this international group of investors will strengthen our market position."

The company's BitSpread encoding technology is 10,000 times more reliable than conventional RAID storage at a tenth of the cost per terabyte. It easily scales up to tens of petabytes. By combining a series of energy-saving technologies, Amplidata's storage appliances need just 10W per terabyte of raw disk capacity, a five-fold saving compared with conventional storage.

Amplidata already has a successful OEM business across Europe and the US. This round of funding will allow the company to expand its sales and marketing operations into the US market. Swisscom Ventures' involvement shows that the solution is also of strategic relevance to telecom operators.

"Amplidata storage technology is disruptive in the best possible sense," says Frank Maene, Managing Partner at Big Bang Ventures. "Put simply, it is more cost-effective, more reliable and greener than competing storage solutions."

"Wim De Wispelaere and Wouter Van Eetvelde are innovators and industry veterans," adds Dominique Pitteloud, Senior Investment Director at Endeavour Vision. "It's an attractive investment because they're a strong team, with innovative solutions in a hot market."

Amplidata offers a new generation of scalable, highly available storage targeted at cloud computing applications. Addressing the need of both primary storage and backup, the Amplidata solution requires three times less disk storage, is five times more power-efficient than current solutions and is ten times less expensive. The company was founded in 2008 by Wim De Wispelaere (CEO) and Wouter Van Eetvelde (COO), two storage industry veterans, and high-tech visionary Kristof De Spiegeleer (Chairman). Amplidata is headquartered in Lochristi, Belgium, with business operations in Redwood City (CA), USA, and R&D operations in Germany, Egypt and India. For more information, see www.amplidata.com.

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 help startups accelerate their growth. 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 information, see www.bbv.be.

Endeavour Vision combines a team of experienced venture capital professionals responsible for investments in over 80 companies in 12 countries in technology and life sciences since 1989. Our firm targets companies that have the potential to become global leaders. Beyond access to capital, Endeavour Vision brings years of experience, expertise and network to its entrepreneurs, plus a passion for success. For more information, see www.endeavourvision.com.

Swisscom Ventures is the corporate venturing arm of Swisscom AG - Switzerland's leading telecom operator. The group was founded in 2005 as a division of Swisscom's group level activities, and is focused on investing in early-stage growth companies with strategic relevance to Swisscom and its operating business lines.

Amplidata contact: Wim De Wispelaere, Amplidata NV, Antwerpsesteenweg 19, B-9080 Lochristi, Belgium. Tel: +32 9 324 25 90. Email: info@amplidata.com

Big Bang Ventures contact: Frank Maene, Managing Partner, Hummingbird Ventures, Rijnkaai 98, Hangar 26, B-2000, Antwerpen, Belgium. Tel: +32 477 20 17 82. Email: frank@bbv.be

Endeavour Vision contact: Dominique Pitteloud, Endeavour Vision SA, 6 rue de la Croix d'Or, 1204 Geneva, Switzerland. Tel: +41 22 544 6000. Email: dp@endeavourvision.com

Swisscom AG, Media Relations. Tel: +41 31 342 91 93. Email media@swisscom.com