SPRING, Texas—Pivot3 this week nabbed $24 million in series C venture vending, which company officials said will boost sales and marketing efforts and new product development.

The funding round was led by new investor Mesirow Financial Capital Partners IX and also included new investor Silver Creek Ventures, and existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and InterWest Partners.

Pivot3, which touts itself as the inventor of virtual distributed RAID, last year entered into the scalable network storage market with an IP-based storage cluster that the company said "delivers up to five times the performance at half of the cost of competitive solutions."

Robert Fernander, CEO of Pivot3, said the funding will also help the company develop its technology for other applications within the security marketplace.

"The technology is horizontally applicable," he said. "It is focused on video surveillance vertical now, but later we will expand into other opportunities and we are looking at the fall for that."

Storage attributes to approximately 50 percent of the cost of a surveillance installation, Fernander said. He said Pivot3's solutions enables end users to leverage existing infrastructure.

"We can accommodate greater frame rate, higher resolution and increase retention rate with a 'pay as you grow' approach, is how we categorize it," he said. "What we are learning in many ways is that we are allieviating problems some of the newer high resolution camera companies have with their customers."

Daniel Hoswell, senior managing partner at Mesirow Financial, said in a press release that the firm looks for companies that can have "high impact in growing markets." He said that with a successful team from both the data storage and physical security markets, Pivot3 is a company leading the high-growth market formed at the convergence of storage and physical security.

For more on this story, see the March 2008 issue of Security Director News.