Symform Nabs $1.5 Million For Online Backup Services

By John Cook

April 27, 2009

After 12 years at Microsoft, Praerit Garg said life started to feel a little bit like the movie “Groundhog Day.” Every new day just seemed identical to the last one. So Garg, along with Microsoft engineer Bassam Tabarra, decided it was time to break that pattern and join the startup ranks.

“We wanted to go do something that would give us new experiences and new growth,” said Garg. That philosophy led to Symform, a cloud computing startup that today is announcing $1.5 million from OVP Venture Partners.

Operating under the radar for more than a year, the Seattle upstart is announcing a novel way for companies to protect corporate data in the case of a natural or human-led disasters. It is doing this by creating what amounts to a co-op where customers turn over unused storage capacity on their servers in exchange for online back up services.

It works like this. If a company has 300 gigabytes of data they want backed up, they “donate” that amount of storage capacity from their internal servers.

Garg, the former senior director in Microsoft’s Server and Tools division, said …

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OVP Invests $1.5M in Cloud Data Storage Startup, Symform