Founded by Kai Li, Ben Zhu and Brian Biles, the company incubated in a series of venture capital offices in Silicon Valley before product revenue began at the beginning of 2004, including U.S. Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Greylock Partners following their 2002 funding round from NEA and Greylock. The company offered a disk-based substitute for the tape automation market. The offering was an implementation of lossless data compression, optimized for streaming workloads, which compared incoming large data segments against all others stored in its multi-TB store. This provided significant speed advantages compared to tape. Originally categorized as "capacity optimization" by industry analysts, it later became more widely known as inline "data deduplication.” Unlike most non-archival computer storage products, it went to extreme technical lengths to ensure data longevity. Its design goal was to be "the storage of last resort." Unlike most of its early competition, it was first packaged as a file-system appliance, making it more predictable than a software product and simpler to manage than a virtual tape library system.
Funding, IPO and Acquisition
NEA and Greylock led the company’s $9.3 million Series A funding round in 2002. Sutter Hill Ventures led its $17 million Series B funding round in 2003, joined again by NEA and Greylock. Through 2005, the three companies invested a total of $40 million in Data Domain. Data Domain Corporation went public on June 27, 2007, raising $110.85 million from 7.39 million shares. This put the stock price at $15 per share, above the forecasted range of $11.50 to $13.50. The company’s market capitalization was $776.5 million at the time of the IPO. In June 2009, EMC Corporation announced their intention to acquire Data Domain Corp. for $2.4B, outbidding NetApp’s earlier offer. In July of that same year, EMC and Data Domain Corp. reached a definitive agreement regarding the acquisition. Former CEO Frank Slootman published a book about his experiences working at this company in 2011. Development of the Dell EMC Data Domain product line continues at Dell EMC.
