I am thrilled to share that Nasuni has raised a $60M financing round to enable accelerated product development, innovation, and market expansion. The round of financing was led by new investor, Sixth Street Partners, who invested the entire $60M, and represents a significant increase in value for Nasuni, just 18 months after our last outside financing round closed. With this financing, we have raised $148M through four rounds over the last 5 years, and now have $100M in cash to continue to invest in our market leading, cloud independent, enterprise cloud file services and to grow our incredible base of 600 plus enterprise customers.
A bit of background: I know that folks say this often, but we really were not looking to raise capital, as we had a strong balance sheet with $40M in cash on hand at 12/31/21. Over the last five years, we have been a very capital efficient company maintaining a modest burn rate while at the same time our SaaS revenue has grown at a steady compounded annual growth rate of 42%. However, the unprecedented events of the past 24 months have accelerated cloud transformation for businesses. Enterprises are aggressively adopting cloud solutions to strengthen cyber resilience, support a hybrid work model, and get unlimited scale to meet business needs. And we have experienced this shift in our business. In 2021 we saw 81% growth in new customer bookings and contract values continuing to expand regularly into the high 6 and 7 figure range.
At the same time, towards the end of the year, we started talking with Sixth Street, and together we concluded that with a stronger balance sheet we would be able to really lean into this opportunity through increased investment in both technology and market expansion and take advantage of the short comings of other technology in the market. We are very proud of the partnerships we have built with the big three cloud providers, but the market will need, and our customers demand, a cloud independent, multi-cloud file service provider with advanced capabilities. The large legacy file companies do not have the technology to deliver this capability, and instead are looking to partner with the hyperscalers. Other “up-and-comer” technologies have merely attempted to build a faster mouse trap, but their solution is still “box constrained”. Nasuni, with our cloud-native architecture, is the best positioned technology to fill this market need. We see this massive opportunity every day as we continue to pick off one enterprise account after another, taking business from the legacy competitors. And Sixth Street recognizes this opportunity as well, which led to a partnership and a belief that we can continue to build the premier enterprise cloud file services company in the market.
I want to thank Sixth Street for the partnership – we welcome you to the team. I also want to thank our 600+ customers who believe in us and push us to be better every day. A SaaS business is a very different business from shipping product, it requires a true partnership between customer and vendor. Based on our top decile NPS scores and customer retention rates, I am proud of the service we deliver to you. But we can always do better – keep pushing us. And finally, we have the best, smartest, most dedicated employees in the world! Thank you to all our Nasunistas! And by the way, if you want to join the team, we are hiring all around the world!
