Makes them not come off as a fad or BS scheme to get a VC exit on a non-product, yeah? Interesting traits. I hadn't noticed it until you pointed it out and then... what you said might be why I hadn't noticed them lol. I'll add that a tech company operating in stealth or low-buzz mode has the extra advantage of building up quite an income stream before competitors' marketing or legal teams notice. That money helps when either responds to the new threat to their market share.

Some of the best companies I ran into in robust, software engineering are still unknowns. You don't see them or their methods on HN, Reddit, and so on. Yet, they continue to slowly grow and be profitable by word-of-mouth as they deliver results day in and day out. Nothing wrong with advertising but I admire those companies the most.

Avalon and NHN are actually far from no name :)

Avalon has been our partner from our Series A and has funded some amazing startups like Indix, SkyCatch, Nanigans, CloudKick (YC S09), Chartio (YC S10), and Cloudant (YC S08). As an aside, Rich Levandov, who is on our board, was also one of the founders of Phoenix Technologies, creators of Phoenix BIOS

NHN is not well known in the valley, but it's Naver Corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naver_Corporation) which is one of South Korea's largest telecoms, and is also the parent company behind the Line messaging app.

We haven't talked much about it in our release, but one of the reasons we partnered with NHN is that there's a lot of need for data sovereignty in EMEA, and NHN is in a position to help us enter the asian markets.

btw, huge congratulations to the team there. Really awesome people.

Avalon is a no name? That's new to me.