Western Digital Technologies has made some big announcement this week. The US storage giant has just announced that it has acquired the Cloud Services Startup Upthere to beef up its cloud-based services. However, financial terms of the deal were not disclosed to the public.
According to TechCrunch, the US storage giant has acquired Upthere to offer more innovative ways for consumers and enterprises to create and store data. Upthere offers a file-syncing service, similar to DropBox and other cloud-based storage services. The deal is expected to help Western Digital (WD) build up its cloud-based services.
About the American storage giant
Founded in 1970 and based in Irvine, California, Western Digital is a computer data storage company that provides hard disk drives (HDD) and solid-state drives for desktop and notebook computers as well as capacity enterprise market. The company also provides storage solutions for consumer electronics products such as gaming consoles, multifunction printers, DVRs, set-top boxes, automobile navigation systems and camcorders.
The company has also made several acquisitions in the past years. In March 2011, the company acquired rival company Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for around $3.5 billion and became the biggest hard disk drives manufacturer in the market.
In October 2015, it acquired the Milpitas-based SanDisk, which also provides data storage solutions in the US and global market. WD Technologies have acquired San Disk for a whopping 19 billion in cash and stock.
SanDisk brought two decades of expertise and experience in system solutions, NVM and manufacturing to Western Digital.
The combined strengths enable WD to capture growth and great opportunities created by fast-evolving storage market. More importantly, it enabled the company to capture a bigger slice of the computer storage market.
About Upthere
Founded in 2012, Upthere is a cloud services company that based in Redwood City, California. The startup was founded to address the growing issues of local data storage on Android, iOS, MacOS, OS X, and Windows.
The company provides a single cloud-based storage space for storing digital contents.
Before the WD acquisition, Upthere has raised $77 million in fresh venture capital in July 2016. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Western Digital Capital, the investment arm of Westen Digital Technologies, led Upthere’s venture funding round. The company’s investors include Floodgate, Elevation Partners, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Western Digital capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufled & Byers.
As a part of the acquisition, Upthere CEO Chris Bourdon will be joining WD as a "strategic leader" to will help with the user experience and cloud services. Finally, Upthere will continue to create new products and features under the Western Digital Technologies.
