Storage startup Copan gets $18.5 million investment

18.02.2009
Investors have poured an additional US$18.5 million into Copan Systems, a storage startup that sells cheap disks to reduce the cost of of data.

Founded in 2002, Copan is on the verge of reaching profitability, with 160 enterprise customers such as Comcast, , the New York Stock Exchange and the U.S. government, according to CEO Mark Ward. The additional funding round led by new investor Westbury Partners will help build out distribution channels and bolster the company's engineering organization to ensure key products are delivered later this year.

"We're currently an unprofitable company that will be profitable in mid-year of this year," Ward says. "This cash will get us through to profitability and beyond."

Copan, based in Colorado, cut about 15% of its workforce in December, bringing its head count down to 110 employees, Ward says.

This is Copan's fifth round of financing since the company was founded in 2002. The was announced in September 2007, and at the time brought Copan up to a total of $87.5 million. Additional investors in the latest round, which was announced Tuesday, include Austin Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, Firstmark Capital, and Credit Suisse. Copan sells MAID storage systems, or massive arrays of idle disks, with SAS and SATA drives to store persistent, infrequently-accessed data. Ward says Copan's architecture eliminates some of the component parts that go into high-performance, mission-critical transactional storage systems built by or , resulting in a cheaper, denser platform. ()

"What we do is build and deliver a new storage platform, specifically for copies of data, backup and archive," Ward says. "By focusing only on that data type, we're able to dramatically reduce the overall cost."