Code 42 Software, a Minnesota-based online backup company for consumers, businesses and the enterprise, has raised $52.5 million in funding led by Accel Partners with participation from Split Rock Partners. This is the first major investment from Accel’s recently announced Big Data Fund, which is dedicated to funding infrastructure and application companies in “Big Data.” This is the first round of institutional investing for Code 42.

You may not have heard of Code 42, but the enterprise company should be on your radar. Founded by Brian Bispala, Mitch Coopet and Matthew Dornquast, Code 42 launched CrashPlan, a personal data protection and backup software, back in 2007. The intention of CrashPlan was to reinvent backup by developing an easy-to-use technology to protect data whenever and wherever it is created. After introducing CrashPlan to consumers, Code 42 decided to use this knowledge gained to develop and deliver a backup software that was enterprise-grade.

Just five years after launching CrashPlan, Code 42 now manages and protects over 100 petabytes of data globally. In addition to CrashPlan for consumers, Code 42’s product lineup includes online backup solutions for the SMB, CrashPlan PRO, and private and public cloud solutions for the enterprise, CrashPlan PROe. All of the company’s data storage and backup products are cross-platform, and provide continuous protection onsite, offsite and online.

The virtue of Code 42′s offering is that the software can be used for both public and private clouds. Dornquast explained to me in an interview that most large enterprises believe in a hybrid model, with four out of five of the company’s enterprise customers building their own private cloud as opposed to relying on an untrusted cloud.

Dornquast says that Code 42′s ‘secret sauce’ is the company has engineered its own storage technology, that allows businesses to build their own private clouds. As he explains, Code 42 is “part software company, part cloud storage company, and part managed appliance hardware company.”

Crashplan product has been deployed in over 4000 “big data” enterprise environments and customers include: Adobe, Google, Groupon, HP, Intuit, NASA, LinkedIn, Salesforce.com, and Stanford University. For example, Dornquast said Google has been is using Crashplan for internal data storage. While revenue was not disclosed, the company has seen 500 percent growth over the last three years, and is profitable.

Accel partner Ping Li explains that managing data on multiple devices is a challenge for both consumers and the enterprise, and being able to move this data safely and securely is becoming more and more important. With this in mind, there needs to be real technology behind this issue, he says. Li (and Accel) believes that device and information data management in the cloud is an example of a big data application ripe for disruption.

Code 42 provides a scalable and seamless multi-device “big data information management platform” to continuously protect and manage this growing data in real-time across any device.

What struck Li has being particularly unique about Code 42 (besides the technology itself) is that although the startup provides major infrastructure and helps manage massive amounts of data, the UI is lightweight and resonates with the trend of the consumerization of IT.

As Dornquast tells me, this clean, consumer product-like experience is one of the key reasons the company has been able to pull in customers like Google. The company has been able to back-up over 250 million files per day across multiple data centers  globally; and service customers from soccer moms to Fortune 100 companies.

Code 42 faces competition from Carbonite, Box and others.

The new funding will be will be used to accelerate multi-platform product development and increase sales and marketing efforts internationally.

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