Egnyte Raises $16 Million From Google Ventures For Cloud File Storage Service

Egnyte has raised $16 million from Google Ventures for its cloud file storage solution. Existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers  and Polaris Ventures also participated in the Series C round.

Egnyte provides a service that stores documents in a cloud environment with the file appearing on the desktop with shared and private folders.

For instance, with Google Apps, people may use Egnyte to access files from Google GDrive or any other file on the hard drive. Docs may be edited and updated on the local and cloud drives.

Egnyte’s strength is in its accessibility but with IT setting policy for how it can be used. With this type of control, IT can give access to users from both in and outside an organization:

Egnyte is banking on the popularity of the hybrid cloud for its long-term growth. It’s the trend all the major cloud services providers are talking about as enterprise shops seek the most logical path to cloud adoption. That means keeping the servers they need and extending out to a cloud service that anyone with permissions may then use.

CEO Vineet Jain said in an interview that the opening of the enterprise market traces back to services such as Dropbox, which raised awareness of how storage can be used.

Egnyte is playing in a deeply competitive space. It competes with the like of Box, Mozy,  Syncplicity, SugarSync and,Nasuni, Funding is deep for storage vendors, Box alone raised $81 million last fall.