Egnyte raises $10M from Kleiner Perkins for dirt cheap cloud storage

Low-cost online storage provider Egnyte announced today that it has raised $10 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Egnyte is an online file server that any company can wrap in its own brand — a white-label service — that is dirt cheap for smaller and mid-sized companies. For companies with less than 20 employees, it can cost a flat $10 per month — and it goes up to around $100 a month for a company with 1,000 users. That’s compared to other enterprise services that usually charge for each user — like online storage provider Box.net.

Each tier is based on a different amount of storage — from 20 gigabytes of online storage to 1 terabyte. It offers the usual set of collaboration services, like tracking changes to files and communication tools. Egnyte also gives users a desktop folder that automatically syncs up with the remote server, so users don’t have to worry about using the web-based server.

The company also has mobile applications on the iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and phones running Google’s Android mobile operating system. Egnyte also launched a second version of its iPad application today that focuses on offering more security features — often a sore point for companies that are reluctant to move their information and services to remote servers run by companies like Egnyte and Amazon.

Egnyte is going up against some pretty significant players in the space, including Y Combinator-backed Dropbox — which does appear from time to time in the enterprise — and online storage and collaboration service Box.net. Like both of those services, Egnyte uses a freemium model with a free trial. But unlike those services, the Egnyte’s storage is dirt cheap.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company raised $6 million in an earlier institutional fundraising round led by Polaris Venture Partners and Maples Investments. Egnyte also raised an unspecified amount of seed funding. The newest round brings Egnyte’s funding to $16 million.