Aprigo, is a Waltham, MA-based startup developing data management applications via SaaS to help mid-sized companies control massive data growth.

Aprigo's founders (three former members of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF)) have decades of IT management experience among them.  When they decided to form a company to tackle problems they had experienced in their own previous roles, they began by talking with hundreds of end users and experts about their IT challenges, resulting in a series of groundbreaking ideas about storage, security, and data management.  This early work led them to recognize some common but unmet IT needs, such as the need to:

• manage exploding data growth;
• maintain security as the highest priority;
• get the most out of existing storage, but without any way to clearly understand the nature of the data already stored in the IT environment; and
• obtain simpler, less expensive, and more powerful tools for dealing with the problems listed above.

In 2008, Aprigo raised the first round of funding and started to build a prototype for a system that could help IT managers solve all of these problems.

Gil Zimmermann, CEO of Aprigo, realized the importance of intellectual property protection for his company early on.  According to Gil, "IP protection is critical for any business, and it's the fast businesses that beat out the slow ones. In a startup like Aprigo, we needed an IP superstar that understood the sense of urgency, and could move at our pace without compromising on quality. We partnered with Robert Plotkin who provided us the ability to act quickly, and the guidance help lay out our next steps. Building out our IP portfolio is strategic, and having a strategic partner like Robert Plotkin provides us and our investors with the peace of mind that we will sustain our competitive advantage and flexibility to take on the big players in the market."

After several rounds of feedback and numerous iterations of the product, the first publicly available version of the suite, Aprigo NINJA, was released in September of 2009. In January of 2010, the first paid version of the suite, Aprigo NINJA Pro, was launched, adding file access management capabilities to the free offering.

Aprigo NINJA helps IT professionals visualize their unstructured data (files), and:

• Find out who has access to sensitive data (financials, HR records, Intellectual Property, etc.)
 
• Generate an audit trail of permissions and track how they change over time
 
• Understand what kinds of files are taking up space
 
• Compare their data environment with all other Aprigo NINJA users anonymously using IT Benchmarking
 
• Understand the cost implications of files by type, age, and access using a built-in cost calculator

Since its launch, Aprigo has been selected Microsoft BizSpark Startup of the day, and was named one of Network World's Top 10 IT Management Startups To Watch. Aprigo has also been selected to present at the prestigious Under The Radar Conference in April, 2010.