The company, which currently has about 60 employees, plans to use the investment in research and development, but primarily to expand its sales and marketing. “We are going to grow that considerably. We will be well over 100 people by the end of the year,” said Panzura founder and CEO Randy Chou.

Founded in July 2008, Panzura raised $6 million in a Series A funding back in September 2008 and another $12 million in October 2010. The firm sells a cloud storage controller based on a mix of solid-state drives (SSDs) hard disk drives (HDDs) and aimed at public and private cloud storage. The Quicksilver cloud controller is based on the company’s cloud FS global file system.

Also, the Quicksilver controller features include global file locking, data deduplication and encryption. The controller supports CIFS and NFS, and provides offline capabilities through on-board SSD storage. The controller can be used with or without the cloud, and speeds the performance of storage arrays for data replication, backup or primary storage.

The company sells into the high-end enterprise, with deals ranging between $250,000 to $1 million, said Chou. Also, partners Hewlett-Packard, Nirvanix, EMC, Amazon and Google make up about 75 percent of its lead generations. “In two weeks alone, we got into 30 to 40 EMC deals. HP , Nirvanix and EMC brings the company into many of their enterprise cloud deals,” Chou said. “That is what attracted most of our investers in the Series C funding.”