IPO is the next big milestone for us, says Actifio boss

Data virtualisation company wants another round of funding this year, but does not expect a further $100m

Actifio has announced that an IPO is just around the corner, and will be the "next big milestone" for the company going into 2016.

The vendor – which offers data virtualisation tools to businesses – said there is a possibility of another round of funding in the meantime following last year’s $100m (£65m) financing.

Founded in 2009, Actifio has so far raised about $208m in venture capital funding and has received a valuation of $1bn, placing it in the ranks of so-called unicorns such as Uber, Snapchat and Elon Musk’s Space X.

CEO and founder of Actifio, Ash Ashutosh – who has previously hinted at IPO plans – claimed at a London-based partner event that he was not expecting another $100m in private funding and would, in fact, be happy with nothing.

“There is still time to figure out this year’s funding, and the next big milestone for us is to try to get to be a public company,” he said. “I don't think we will raise another $100m in funding. I think that makes it very hard to become a public company because immediately you move the bar up. So it will be a much smaller amount. It could even be nothing.”

Jason Rabbetts, managing director of Actifio partner Union Solutions, said: "[An IPO] would obviously give [Actifio] a lot more financial resources to continue the progression of its R&D plan, which is a good thing. A disruptive technology such as Actifio’s data virtualisation – which completely changes the paradigm for how you approach delivering solutions for certain use cases – can save organisations a significant amount of money.”

Ashutosh went on to say that Actifio – partnered with the likes of Softcat, Computacenter and Arrow – poses a unique opportunity in the market by taking out the cost and dependency on infrastructure that characterises other major players in the storage space.

“We have about 1,200 users now in 37 countries, and 58 of the largest service providers are powered by Actifio. Sungard, IBM, Verizon, AT&T – there is a bunch of firms that use us.”

The firm would not share the exact figures but said it saw revenue double year on year globally in its last financial year, with the biggest growth coming from EMEA. Its virtualisation technology is used in such areas as financial, banking, and e-commerce.

Steve Jackson, EMEA channel director at Actifio, said: “We are addressing a market, which is worth $55bn, and we are just at the forefront of that market. The opportunity for us is huge. Our growth is down to the ability to scale more than anything else.”

The last nine months have seen the company invest in its UK team, which Jackson says has grown up to five times its initial size, to about 20 people.

Going forward, Ashutosh says he sees a "squeeze" being put on the storage market's biggest players in the coming years.

“You may not have noticed, but research finds that 20 per cent of the storage business is [made up of products] sold by ‘other’. And guess who ‘others’ are – they are companies with no brand name who sell storage to the Facebooks and Googles of the world and package a solution around it, because it is an absolute commodity.

“It is only a matter of time before the traditional guys will get really squeezed from the bottom,” he said.