US-based cloud storage startup LucidLink announced a $12M Series A round, led by global VC firm Headline and with Adobe as a key investor. Previous investors Baseline Ventures and Sofia-based BrightCap Ventures also participated in the round.
The funding will be used for further growth of the company and further improvement of customer experience. LucidLink was founded in 2016 by the Bulgarian George Dochev and Peter Thompson, who both met while working at software storage company DataCore. The Filespaces cloud-native NAS solution of the startup enables teams to access and transfer large amounts of data, stored in the cloud and move it over the internet with no need to rely on local devices. LucidLink has had its development unit based in Sofia for over 3 years.
“LucidLink has been one of the first companies in BrightCap’s portfolio and the founders George and Peter are an incredible team that has gone with a lot of resilience through some difficult times. This Series A is a testimony that the path they have chosen for LucidLink is the right one. We’re very happy that Headline has decided to trust them and lead their Series A, along with a leader like Adobe who also joined the round. We believe that LucidLink has a fair chance of bearing local storage and enabling most companies to use their software-based storage,” said in front of The Recursive Daniel Lorer, Managing Partner at BrightCap Ventures.
Streaming data without gateways
LucidLink allows users to have immediate access to data across the globe, as an extension of their local drive. Eliminating the need to download or synchronize data, the Filespace solution is available for all major operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and macOS. It is compatible with Azure Blob and any S3 object storage provider that employs cloud, on-premise, or hybrid storage. The SaaS service is delivered without a need for middleware or any virtual or physical appliance.
History and track record
George Dochev started working for DataCore Software in 1998, where he headed the technical development team. Later on, he led the engineering division of the company that managed to attract a total of $95M between 1998 and 2008. He met Thompson during his time at DataCore and the two set off to develop a prototype and establish LucidLink in 2016.
The startup attracted $1.6M from top-tier Silicon Valley investors in 2017. After that, it closed a funding round in the summer of 2018, finishing off the year by receiving another $6M in its seed round, $900K of which came from Bulgarian BrightCap Ventures. Up to this point, it has raised as much as $20M.
Apart from its headquarters in San Francisco, the company has offices in Bulgaria, Europe, and Australia, with its workforce amounting to around 30 people.
The global projections
The global cloud storage market is projected to grow from $50.1B in 2020 to $137.3B by 2025. Streaming object storage eases the process of working with big files of data and collaborating online, especially when the data becomes too voluminous to be accessed via workspaces such as Dropbox or VPN. Cloud solutions of this type are becoming more and more popular and are developed by players such as AWS (Amazon Web Services).
