Mimosa Bubbles Over With $17M For Expansion
By Scott Denne - VentureWire April 2, 2007
With one foot in North America, email archiving company Mimosa Systems Inc. looks to step into Europe and Japan with help from a $17 million Series C round of financing.
New investor Mayfield Fund led the round with participation from existing investors Clearstone Venture Partners, August Capital and JAFCO Ventures.
"Mimosa targets a market that is just exploding. If you look at the data from the analysts, the market for document and email archiving is supposed to exceed $10 billion," said Navin Chaddha, a managing director for the Mayfield Fund.
The new round doubles the amount of venture capital that Mimosa Systems has raised. The company, founded in December 2003, previously secured $17 million over two rounds. August Capital and Clearstone participated in all three rounds. Dot Edu Ventures also participated in the company's $6.5 million Series A round.
Proceeds from the Series C round will be used for establishing a presence in the European and Japanese markets as well as expanding sales and marketing in North America, said T.M. Ravi, president and chief executive of Mimosa Systems. This January, the company took its first step in that direction by opening an office in Munich.
The company's first product, Mimosa NearPoint, provides email document archiving and discovery technology built on the Microsoft Exchange platform. The technology instantly captures email and other documents, such as instant messages, making for efficient disaster recovery, and allows end-users to access their part of the archive, Ravi said.
For Mimosa, a move to Europe has great potential because Microsoft Exchange, the platform that NearPoint is built for, is widespread, said Sumant Mandal, a managing director at Clearstone.
"The decision to reinvest was based more on how well the company was growing," Mandal added. "It's a corporate asset because what companies used to store on databases they now store on emails."
In addition to international expansion, the Series C money will provide fresh capital for product development. Mimosa plans on developing products to extend past Microsoft to Linux and other platforms, Ravi said.
The company has 160 customers, including Washington State University, Sears Roebuck and Co. and Banc of America Securities LLC, and had its first full year of revenue in 2006.
The company expects that this round will be its last venture financing. "In late 2008 we'll be cash flow positive and then we'll be in a position to contemplate public offering," Ravi said.
In addition to its Santa Clara, Calif. headquarters, Mimosa Systems has a development office in Pune, India, with 120 employees spread over its three locations.