AlephCloud Latest Cloud Startup to Raise Financing for Expansion

Venture capitalists have certainly taken an interest in the growing number of cloud computing startup companies emerging and carving their own niches in the ever-expanding market. The latest startup to receive a hefty dose of funding is AlephCloud, a provider of technology that manages content privacy and provenance in public clouds.

The Series B financing round was led by Handbag LLC and added $7.5 million to AlephCloud’s, bringing the cloud company’s total financing up to $9.5 million. Handbag is a “new wave” venture capital firm formed by Seth Neiman, a Silicon Valley investor and former CrossPoint general partner who has now joined the AlephCloud board of directors.

“With the advent of personal devices and data sharing in public clouds, the traditional ‘moat and citadel’ approach to content protection is broken,” Neiman said in a prepared statement. “AlephCloud technology will redefine content and device management for the cloud era.”

Additionally, AlephCloud is one of six startups to be selected for Orange Fab, a technology accelerator program managed by Orange Silicon Valley.

Here at Talkin’ Cloud, we’ve been covering a lot of venture capital infusions into cloud startups recently, and it feels like the number of cloud fledgling cloud companies receiving financing to build up their sales, marketing and engineering teams is ramping up at a fast pace.

It may be easy to draw parallels between the bandwagon jumping of the cloud era and the dot-com boom, but there’s a key difference this time around. Venture capitalists invested in just about every hair-brained scheme, no matter what the revenue prospects were, back in the late 1990s. Lessons were learned, and it seems they stuck.

Venture capitalists today are financing businesses that prove they have something to offer the market, and although some of those firms are bound to fail, it will likely be because of changing market dynamics rather than poor business models.

With AlephCloud, which aims to help organizations get a handle on BYOD and BYOC for privacy, security and compliance, this latest round of funding will likely give it the opportunity to expand its own business. Additionally, both founders, CEO Jieming Zhu and CTO Roy D’Souza, are not new to running cloud organizations or successful startups. Sounds like a good combination.