Waltham, Massachusetts:Waltham-based Protection and Availability Storage (PAS) platform company, Actifio has raised $33.5 million in series C round of funding from Andreesen Horowitz and existing investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, and Advanced Technology Ventures. As a part from the investment, Peter Levine, a veteran enterprise IT executive and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz has joined Actifio’s board.

Actifio had raised $16 million in series B from Advanced Technology Ventures, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Greylock Partners in September 2010; and $8 million in Series A from North Bridge Venture Partners and Greylock Partners in July 2010.

Actifio plans to use the funds to expand the sales coverage, enhance client support and Net Promoter Score and grow fast enough to become a relevant vendor in the market to gain the trust of the client base. It addresses a global, horizontal market with a pervasive problem and the current core focus is on mid and large enterprise IT organizations and Managed Service Provider markets.

Ash Ashutosh, Founder and CEO, Actifio, says, “Data centers are in a midst of transformation to take advantage of virtualization and cloud technologies and business models. We address one of the most complex and expensive part of the stack.  With a market size of over $34 billion and a proven track record of delivering value to the market, it is not a surprise that there is a significant interest in the investor community to assist and work with us to foster this paradigm shift.”

Ashutosh has more than 25 years of experience is the storage industry and as an entrepreneur. He has headed several industry initiatives including iSCSI and storage virtualization and led the authoring of numerous storage industry standards. In the past, Ashutosh has been a Partner with Greylock Partners and Vice President and Chief Technologist for HP Storage. He has founded ApplQ Serano Systems, prior to which he was the Senior Vice President at StorageNetworks. He has also worked as an architect and engineer at LSI and Intergraph. Ashutosh has a degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Penn State University.

Andreessen Horowitz is a stage-agnostic venture capital firm, which provides seed, venture and growth-stage funding to the best new technologies. The firm has over $1.2 billion under the management across two funds, and has made over 60 investments, including Facebook, Groupon, Skype, Twitter, and Zynga.