File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive has raised $1.5 million in funding led by Sherpalo Ventures with Tandem Entrepreneurs and VeriFone CEO Douglas Bergeron participating. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here.
While there are a plethora of syncing and storage services available to users, Zumodrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service has a different twist-the service tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.
ZumoDrive, which currently has 300,000 users, recently launched a new version which lets users to access their music playlists, photo albums and document folders on any device. ZumoDrive mimics a standard hard drive but saves content in the cloud and then streams it to each device instead of saving local copies, making it the killer app for the netbook and other devices with limited storage.
Zumo now plays nice with the iPhone, with an new app that lets users sync their content to their phone without having todeal with local storage capacity issues. And ZumoDrive released a new version of its system that wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their devices to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. The service has also been upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. ZumoDrive will use the new funding for product development.
Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.