Gemini Invests in Axxana
Gemini Israel Funds Announces Investment in Axxana

June 18, 2007 – Herzliya, Israel.  Gemini Israel Funds announced today a $5 million dollar A-round investment in Disaster Recovery (DR) start-up Axxana. 

The company previously received seed capital from prominent angels, all highly involved in the Enterprise Software business. Among them Roni Einav and Dalia Prashker, founders of New Dimension Software, Dan Barnea, Senior Vice President at BMC Software and  Eilon Tirosh and Roni Zarom, founders of Exalink.

Axxana operates in the area of Information Disaster Recovery, one of the fastest growing markets in Enterprise IT, which has received increasing awareness and interest since the 9/11 catastrophe in 2001.  High attention to Disaster Recovery globally stems from various motivations including: stringent government regulations, customers’ expectations, the significant costs of downtime reaching at times several millions of dollars per hour and the real risk of going out of business after disaster strikes.
Axxana's revolutionary solution enables complete data recovery with no data loss at a secondary site which may be situated as far as thousands of miles away from the primary location. Axxana's products enable a far more effective DR solution whilst dramatically cutting on indirect replication costs, such as excess Data Centers and expensive communication lines. The company is operating in stealth mode and has already attracted key strategic customers to support the company.

The company was co-founded by renowned storage industry expert Alex Winokur, Ph.D., serial entrepreneur Eli Efrat and successful sales and business development executive Dan Hochberg.  Alex is an IBM “Master Inventor” and was a senior manager at IBM research labs.  He also co-founded Sepaton – a storage industry leader.  Eli is the former CEO of MessageVine and co-founder of Veon, a company acquired by Phillips. Dan founded and headed the Asia Pacific operations for Radvision (NASDAQ: RVSN) with a remarkable sales record.

The team has attracted top-tier advisors, such as Moshe Yanai, the inventor and forefather of today's Storage Area Networks and Fred van den Bosch, former CTO of Veritas. 

  "When you are a startup talking to the large vendors, you need to have the backing of a good VC behind you", said Eli Efrat, CEO of Axxana. "Gemini is a top-tier firm, and we're glad to have them on board."

"Every once in a while there is an alignment of various factors for success as in the case of Axxana today", said Moshe Yanai, Executive Chairman of XIV Information Systems and member of Axxana's Board of Advisors "Axxana is built on the combination of emerging technologies, a real and established market need to solve a real problem, lead by a strong founding team."
Avi Hasson, Gemini General Partner, who joins the Board of Axxana, said, “Axxana is managed by a strong founding team who have already initiated significant relationships with major players in their industry.  This reflects the market need and the company’s innovative solution in the area of Disaster Recovery.”