The Austin-based startup Spanning Cloud Apps, a cloud-based app developer, today announced that it has closed a $2 million series A round, led by the Foundry Group, a VC firm based in Boulder. Seth Levine, Foundry Group’s managing director, will be joining Spanning’s board of directors.
Founded in 2010 by Charlie Wood, Spanning Cloud Apps is the maker of Spanning Backup, a backup service for Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Google’s other cloud-based apps. It’s probably safe to say that Google Apps is the most widely used cloud computing suite out there, and yet, while it’s true that the search giant has great disaster recovery services, Google Apps is missing a fairly important feature — data backup.
So, Google protects you from any kerfuffles that might take place on their end, but if, say, your colleague Bob is distracted by his TPS reports and accidentally deletes a shared company calendar or presentation, Google will not be coming to the rescue.
That’s where Spanning Backup comes in. The service continually backs up your Google Apps data, so that you don’t have to worry about what will happen to your data should disaster strike. Spanning Backup is built on Amazon Web Services and stores user data using a combintaion of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service and Elastic Block Store, which safeguard your Google App data in a purely cloud-based app. It’s also pretty reliable. And can store your Google Apps domain.
Spanning will be competing with the well-established and funded cloud backup and restore service, Backupify. Though Backupify currently offers a wider array of services that it can backup and restore (like, most importantly, email), the company has been a bit unreliable of late, suffering from at least one prolonged outage. So, there’s plenty of room in the field, and Spanning hopes to compete by remaining focused on cloud apps, security, and scalability.
The startup currently has a staff of six, and plans to use its series A round to ramp up hiring efforts and expand into other cloud services. Founder and CEO Charlie Wood said that Spanning’s goal is to be the “Norton Computing of the cloud computing era”. In other words, the startup hopes to provide cloud consumers with the services that should have come in the box, but didn’t. It aims to be a one-stop solution for all the major cloud service providers, be it Google, Salesforce, Workday, Oracle, or Apple.
In terms of pricing, if a business chooses to use Spanning’s services, your first 3 employees would be free. Beyond that, Spanning charges $30 per person for one year of backup. So if you have a business of 6, you pay $90 a year.
For more on Spanning Cloud Apps and Spanning Backup, check out the video below: