Waltham: Seattle based cloud storage vendor Symform has secured $2 million in their series A round of funding from Westfield Capital and existing investors OVP Venture Partners and Longworth Venture Partners. With the new round of investment, the total of series A comes to $7.5 million. Previously, it had raised $4 million from Longworth Venture Partners in 2010 and $1.5 million from OVP Venture Partners in 2009. “We will use these funds to continue to scale our network and invest more in sales, marketing and engineering. But we are still early in our development, and we plan to raise a B round in 2012,” says Praerit Garg, Co-Founder & President, Symform.

The company had recently added Chris Boscolo as VP Engineering and Candace Grisdale as VP Worldwide sales. Talking about the investor interest, Garg says, “Analysts estimate the cloud storage and backup market is around $10 billion, so the opportunity is great. Ours is a de-centralized model, which uses a peer-to-peer architecture to power our global cloud storage network. This means we have much lower costs and can pass on those savings to our customers. Also, our patented algorithms, security model and management capabilities have given us a head start in the market. The VCs are interested because we are achieving record levels of growth.”

Symform was founded in 2007 by Praerit Grag and Bassam Tabbar. It has a QA team in India that is a critical part of its development team.  Prior to founding Symform, Garg was the Senior Director in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, and various other leadership positions. He is also the co-inventor on 14 U.S. and international patents. He has co-authored IETF RFC 3645, Web ServicesWS-Trust and WS-Secure Conversation specifications. Garg pursued his M.S. in Computer Science from Purde University and holds a B.E. from Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani.

“Our customers range from professional consumers, though larger SMBs. We are particularly attractive to a company with a lot of data that can’t afford to implement a proper backup disaster recovery process, even though their business depends on it,” adds Garg.

According to the company 70 percent of SMBs do nothing for proper data backup, and the ones that do backup their data use only local backup like external hard drives or storage devices. In terms of other companies in this space, it feels that nearly all are focused either on the consumer, offering a very basic and not very secure, storage and file sharing capability.

OVP Partners is a VC firm which invests across cleantech, digital biology, and information technology. The typical investment size is around $1 to $ 5 million and it usually partners with other VC firms. It manages over $750 million under its corpus. Its portfolio companies include Allozyne, Collaborative Software, Datasphere Technologies, Complete Genomics, Cradlepoint Technology, and many others.

Westfield Capital Management is an SEC-registered investment advisor that focuses on each segment of the capitalization spectrum. It has over $15 billion under management and its portfolio companies include Polyone, Providence College, Liberty Mutual, and others.

Longworth Venture Partners is a VC firms which invests across various stages. The typical investment varies between $250,000 in case of an initial seed-stage to $4 million in case of a large growth-stage investment.