Why Origin Invested in Atavium

We are pleased to share that Origin has invested in Minneapolis-based data storage startup, Atavium, as a part of an oversubscribed $8.6M investment round.

IDC predicts the amount of data stored annually will increase 10x by 2025, and CIOs are struggling to keep up with this ever-increasing data storage need. Compounding matters, CIOs who manage very large unstructured datasets can no longer throw hardware at the problem — systems either reach limits or they are not cost effective. But data growth is not the extent of the problem. Ubiquity, cloud, legal compliance, security, retention, and privacy compound this challenge.

Atavium offers a solution that can organize, automate, manage, and store exploding unstructured data sets whether they live in the data center or the cloud. Atavium allows organizations, without interruption, to automatically move data based on many factors, such as source, business use, frequency, and accessibility (among others). Much of this is done manually today. Many organizations choose to keep data on expensive data stores because they don’t know what the data are and whether they can be moved.

We invested for three primary reasons: the macro trends, the team and the syndicate.

We love the long-term macro trends behind Atavium. Data are becoming more and more important to companies: it has migrated from backoffice “metrics” to the fundamental product. Explosion of machine learning, IoT, and consumer video/photo capture only accelerates this. We are truly in the data era and there will be many winning companies. Our diligence calls with initial customers confirmed this.

Many of the incumbents in Atavium’s target market are built on technology that is a decade old. Data needs have changed dramatically since then, and that tilts the advantage to new entrants.

The team is sensational. The four founders have all worked together at several extremely successful data storage startups, including NuSpeed (acquired by Cisco), Isilon (acquired by EMC) and Compellent (acquired by Dell). Recently, they led engineering at Dell’s storage division. Having lived through the Cleversafe experience, I know how important it is to have a talented engineering team that can get through commercialization.

Finally, we have a strong syndicate. Each of the institutional investors have direct experience backing successful storage startups, and each has the patience and reserves to see the company to success. In addition, the solution is built on commodity hardware, which reduces the capital requirements and obstacles in the sales cycle.

We are excited to help Ed, Marc, Mark and Mike help build the next-generation data storage company. Read their press release here.