Western Digital has today announced that it purchased Upthere for an undisclosed amount. Upthere had previously raised $77 million from an impressive list of investors, with KPCB and Western Digital Ventures leading the round, along with Floodgate, Elevation Partners, GV, NTT Docomo Ventures and Square 1 Bank.
Upthere wants you to think of its service as the canonical location where your data lives. It’s available for OS X/MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS.
Its three-person founding team is nothing short of impressive. Bertrand Serlet was the former Senior VP of Software Engineering at Apple who oversaw every release of OS X through Snow Leopard and kicked-off the project that later became iOS. Alex Kushnir previously worked at MongoDB and was the founder of the banking-focused file management service Kazeon (which he then sold to EMC). Roger Bodamer previously worked at Oracle, Apple and a number of other Silicon Valley companies.
The company was founded in 2012 to address the growing concern of local data storage on mobile devices. Their solution was to write directly to the cloud, allowing users to mostly bypass the local stage. To do so, the company built the technology from the ground up, including servers, the infrastructure technologies and series that extract metadata from the files, allowing them to be searchable.
The result was a stable experience, but not that different from its competitors.
Clearly Western Digital found something it liked in Upthere and decided to bring it under its fold. Terms of the deal were not released. More as we get it.
Matt Burns is a longtime technology journalist, now Editorial Director at Insight Media Group and formerly Managing Editor at TechCrunch. At Insight Media Group, he guides coverage and contributor programs across fast-growing tech publications. Before that, he spent 15+ years at TechCrunch, rising from contributor to Managing Editor, helping scale the newsroom and program Disrupt’s stages and TechCrunch’s other events. Earlier, he also wrote for Engadget. Matt co-founded the Resilience Conference, an event series at the intersection of defense, security, and startup innovation. There he builds agendas, hosts sessions, and launched “Launch @ Resilience,” a showcase for early-stage teams building nation-defending technology. Across roles, he’s reported on and moderated conversations in AI, mobility, frontier tech, and the hard problems technology companies face. He’s interviewed world leaders, top investors, startup founders, and public-company CEOs. Lifelong Michiganian with plenty of Silicon Valley miles, he brings Midwest empathy and an editor’s eye. Offstage, he works with teams to sharpen narrative and validate go-to-market plans, and, when possible, camping along Lake Michigan.