Nexus Venture Partners injects $ 2 million in storage start-up Datagres

BANGALORE: Nexus Venture Partners has injected first round funding of $ 2 million in Bangalore-based storage startup Datagres which sells data management products to large enterprises. The two-year-old firm will use the funding to market its products and hire talent in the US and Asia markets.

"We have developed a technology that helps to distinguish active application data which is more in demand and bring it closer to applications at the right time for higher performance," said Srinivasan Viswanathan, founder of Datagres.

An alumnus of Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Viswanathan has been awarded 21 patents in storage and systems technology areas. He had founded a storage startup in US a decade ago. However the technology was far ahead of its time to have a market potential and the business took a hit due to financial crisis.

After working as a technologist at multinational companies such as Sun Microsystems and NetApp, Viswanathan returned to India. He did a research on cloud computing, developed a new technology and founded Datagres in 2010.

Its flagship product PerfAccel is a next generation transparent data management platform that accelerates, manages and scales application data in the cloud and enterprise data centres.

According to Viswanathan, the product provides intelligent analytics that allows customers to manage huge amount of data and accelerate application performance in an intuitive manner. "This can result in a three to ten times performance boost," said Viswanathan.

For Nexus Venture Partners which recently raised $ 275 million (Rs 1,250 crore) for its third fund, Datagres is another bet on booming cloud computing market.

"Datagres is an example of world class product companies that are emerging from India," said Sandeep Singhal, co-founder, Nexus Venture Partners, who will be joining the Datagres board.

Mumbai-based Nexus which now manages a corpus of nearly $600 million has already got block buster exits by investing in cloud computing startups and firms.

Of its 40 investments, Nexus has exited from six, including Netmagic, a cloud computing company, that sold a majority stake to Japan's NTT Communications for Rs 900 crore.

Last year, US-based Citrix Systems paid over Rs 1,000 crore to acquire another Nexus portfolio firm Cloud.com. Gluster, a cloud computing startup, too, was bought by Red Hat for approximately Rs 667 crore in an all-cash deal.