Lisbon-based startup Vawlt Technologies has secured an additional €2.15 million ($2.35 million) round of funding to help widen the reach of its “supercloud” distributed storage system.
The last round of funding was in 2021, and the total funding now stands at €3 million ($3.27 million.)
Three new investors made up the latest round, including round leader Lince Capital, along with Basinghall and Beta Capital. There was also participation from existing investors Armilar Venture Partners and Shilling VC, and further investment from two former Cisco and OVHcloud executives who act as business advisors to the firm. Vawlt was founded in 2018 by researchers from the LASIGE research and development group within the University of Lisbon.
“This injection of capital will not only propel us into new markets and reinforce our support for channel partners, it will also fuel the continuous innovation of our product to provide our customers with exactly what they need,” said Ricardo Mendes, CEO of Vawlt.
The startup is also expanding its team, and is now looking to fill positions in both business and product development.
The firm’s proposition seems to be all-encompassing when it comes to file storage and management. Data is distributed in multiple clouds or on-premise nodes, creating that supercloud which enables companies to take advantage of “best-of-breed” multiple storage environments through a single pane of glass. All users’ data is “always available”, promised the firm: “even if some of the clouds are down, if they lose or corrupt the data, and also in the case of a ransomware attack”.
Only the data owner has access to file contents, and all the data is encrypted at the client side. Data never goes through Vawlt’s servers. It travels directly between the users’ machines and the storage clouds. Some of the techniques used by Vawlt include erasure coding and Byzantine-quorum systems “for both dependability and cost-effectiveness”.
“In an era of increasing concerns around data security and privacy, Vawlt’s highly skilled team has been able to materialise almost a decade of research into a leading product in the supercloud environment, positioning the company at the forefront of the future of cloud storage,” gushed Vasco Pereira Coutinho, CEO of Lince Capital.
Vawlt’s platform enables channel partners to tailor and optimise storage to their customers’ respective needs and most common use cases, whether that be to support “hot” or “cold” data.
The default interface is the Vawlt file system, and you can then activate NFS/SMB, S3-API or FTP interfaces according to your needs.
In terms of public clouds, the main ones to work with in the provider’s pool are AWS, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle, OVH and Backblaze.
Prices vary according to the selected specifications, such as provider list, location, volume size, download quota or storage interfaces.
According to the company’s website, Hot storage for recurrent storage and sharing starts at €30.90 ($33.71) per terabyte per month, plus VAT. Warm storage optimised for editable data, accessed less frequently, starts at €16.90 ($18.44) per TB/month, plus VAT. Immutable solutions for files that don’t require changes upon storage are €15.90 ($17.35), and archival systems for files that are stored for long periods of time and rarely read cost €7.90 ($8.62) per TB.
