Investors are throwing some serious money at enterprise backup these days. If you want proof, look at Rubrik, a startup that has developed a hybrid cloud and on-premises backup solution. It landed $40 million in Series B today.
The round was led by Greylock Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and existing angel investors it chose not to name. Today’s investment brings the total over two rounds to an impressive $51 million in just 15 months since its launch.
This is for a company with just 40 employees and 20 early access customers. Apparently, investors see serious potential here. It might not hurt that company co-founder and CEO Bipul Sinha is a former partner at Lighspeed Venture Partners, one of the investors in his company, and knows his way around venture capital.
Rubrik has come up with a way for large enterprise customers — think 1000 or more employees — to solve what it sees as a hybrid backup problem, especially the cloud side of the equation. It is attacking this problem with a hardware solution, it calls the r300 Hybrid Cloud Appliance to help companies manage backup across on-premises data centers and public cloud storage solutions.
Sinha began thinking about enterprise backup because he saw a landscape that was ripe for change. “We were investigating the space and found that a majority [of larger companies] are on-premises, thinking about cloud.” He saw an opening, especially since as he pointed out potential customers need to figure out how to recover files in an efficient way to make public cloud economics work for them.
The appliance includes the standard features you would expect in a backup solution such as policy setting, deduplication and search. What seems to separate it from the pack is the zero-time restores — being able to request a file stored in the cloud and get it back instantly without latency.
His company moves data from the appliance to the cloud fully indexed, meaning it’s searchable. Customers can use that search tool to find, then move a single file from the cloud very quickly
In his view, the public cloud services like Amazon Web Services don’t work as backup for serious enterprises because of recovery times. “You can back up to cloud but not recover from it,” he said. “What we have done is allowed businesses to use public cloud in a secure way without sacrificing speed to recovery.”
While Sinha believes his company is offering something unusual here, there are competitors in this space including Druva, a cloud company which offers a number of similar services. There are also more traditional vendors like CommVault and EMC. Although these companies offer a similar-sounding offerings, he doesn’t see them as serious competition to his company’s solution.
Sinha insists what separates him from these offerings is the recovery speed, and apparently that is a big differentiator.
The company wants to expand its go-to market ability and begin to scale its offering with the new cash. It takes money to build and market a solution like this and Sinha hopes to use the money to significantly increase the company’s markets over the coming years.
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