Symform is calling it an $11 million B round, but only $8 million is in hand. CEO Matthew Schiltz said he expects the other $3 million to come from a strategic partner. He said he’s still talking to possible partners, but expects the deal to include a business development deal as well as funding. When Schiltz was CEO of DocuSign, he secured a business development/strategic funding deal with Salesforce.com.

“We will be doing something similar this year,” he said of his plans for Symform.

Symform president and founder Praerit Garg describes his company’s Global Cloud Storage Network as “a giant RAID system over the Internet. It’s a distributed, decentralized cloud that’s more secure and reliable than a data center. People contribute part of their disks and we aggregate storage across these disks over the internet.”

Garg said the data is encrypted before it leaves customers’ computers. The encrypted data is striped over 96 disks – “we call it RAID 96” – and 32 of the fragments are redundant. That means data can be reconstructed even if 32 fragments are lost.

“We encrypt data, chop it up and geo-spread it,” Schiltz said. “We have our own cloud-controlled brain that manages the peer-to-peer network. We don’t have to build a massive data center to store massive amounts of data.”

Symform software comes preconfigured on QNAP NAS devices, and Schiltz said the startup has about 500 resellers for its cloud. QNAP customers pay $20 per month per bay for the Symform cloud if they contribute space from their device.

Customers who download Symform software on their computers get 10 GB of free cloud storage to begin with. They get another GB free for every GB they give up on their hard drive, up to 200 GB. Beyond 200 GB, Symform charges a subscription fee starting at $3.50 per month for an end-user license and $50 per month for a server license.

Symform also has a partnership with SMB backup software vendor StorageCraft for a Business Continuity Suite service that offers rapid data recovery.

Besides its venture funding – new investor WestRiver Capital led the B round with participation from previous investors OVP and and Longworth Venture Partners – Symform also launched an advisory board. That board consists of Quantum CEO Jon Gacek, DocuSign VP of Engineering Grant Peterson, and Dimitris Achilopta, professor of computer science at the University of Cal-Santa Cruz.