Cloudian
Cloudian CEO, Mike Tso
- Cloudian is a data storage company with an approach that tries to bring the best parts of the cloud to a company's own data centers and servers.
- "Where you don't want to put your data into the cloud, we bring the cloud to you," Tso said.
- The approach has paid off, as the San Mateo, California based company raised a sizable $92 million Series E round last August, bringing its total funding raised to $173 million.
- Below is the the pitch deck that helped Cloudian raise that $92 million round.
When Michael Tso started Cloudian back in 2011, those skeptical of his business model were telling him that public clouds, like the market-leading Amazon Web Services, were going to take over the entire storage market.
Tso's hypothesis, however, was that the future "wouldn't be as simple as a one-size-fits-all approach" when it came to
Instead, Cloudian focused on building a storage product that had similar upsides to the cloud - like lower costs and easier management - but could be housed in a company's own data centers and server rooms. That's important for companies that can't, or won't, move to the cloud, which is clutch for highly regulated industries like finance or healthcare.
"Where you don't want to put your data into the cloud, we bring the cloud to you," Tso said.
The approach has paid off.
Tso said that today there's a growing acceptance that data storage for enterprise companies will be "something like 50/50 split" between what stays in a company's own servers versus what goes into the public cloud.
Investors seem to agree with this approach, as well. Most recently, the San Mateo, California-based company raised a $92 million Series E round last August led by Digital Alpha Advisors, with participation from other firms including Goldman Sachs. Cloudian has raised over $173 million in total.
As for advice on what makes for a successful pitch to VCs, Tso told us that in later rounds like the one in question, investors are less interested in big ideas, and more focused on the actual numbers.
"[VCs] don't just want to see the good stuff," as in the bigger-picture vision, but also a "key set of metrics that will give them hope that the business is growing in the right direction," he said.
The other piece of the puzzle, he says: "The most important thing in all this is to have happy customers."
That's why in every investor deck he includes a slide showing the percentage of customers who would recommend Cloudian to others. For Cloudian, incidentally) that number is 94%.
Here's the pitch deck that helped data storage company, Cloudian, raise a $92 million Series E round - with specific revenue numbers redacted for privacy reasons: