Backup firm Druva protects data in the cloud with $147M in new funding

Druva, a cloud data protection and backup startup based in Sunnyvale, California, today announced that it raised $147 million, pushing the company’s valuation to over $2 billion post-money. Druva says that the capital will bolster a range of initiatives spanning product development and geographic expansion, as well as hiring, delivery, and customer support.

Enterprises are managing nearly 40% more data than a year ago, and the stakes arguably have never been higher. Gartner predicts that at least 75% of IT operations will face one or more cyberattacks by 2025, and the University of Texas found 94% of companies suffering from a catastrophic data loss do not survive. Those statistics are more alarming in light of high-profile outages like that of OVHCloud earlier this year, which took down 3.6 million websites ranging from government agencies to financial institutions to computer gaming companies.

Druva, which was founded in 2008 by Jaspreet Singh, Milind Borate, and Ramani Kothandaraman, provides software-as-a-service-based data protection and management products for over 4,000 organizations including Zoom, NASA, and Pfizer. In 2008, Singh, Borate, and Kothandaraman, who met working together at Veritas Software, formally launched Druva in Pune, India. (In Sanskrit, “druva” translates to “North Star.”) Initially, the company focused on providing management software to financial companies before shifting to general enterprise data management.

In 2018, Druva acquired Letterkenny-based CloudRanger, a back-up and disaster recovery company. The following year, Druva purchased CloudLanes to supplement its on-premises to cloud performance.

Today, Druva offers services that aggregate enterprise data from endpoints, data centers, and cloud workloads for backup and restore, disaster recovery, archival and retention, compliance monitoring, data forensics, and other uses. For example, Druva’s InSync product supports data backup on endpoint devices like laptops, smartphones, and tablets in addition to platforms such as G Suite and Office 365. Druva Phoenix is the company’s solution for physical and virtual file servers, while Druva CloudRanger addresses Amazon Web Services  (AWS) environments and workloads. All of Druva’s offerings run on the Druva Cloud Platform, a cloud-native backup platform built on AWS that provides a centralized backup repository.

Customer momentum

Druva occupies a data backup and recovery market anticipated to be worth $11.59 billion by 2022, according to Markets and Markets. It competes to a degree with San Francisco-based Rubrik, which has raised hundreds of million in venture capital to date for its live data access and recovery offerings. There’s also Cohesity and Clumio, which raked in $51 million for its cloud-hosted backup and recovery tools, as well as data recovery companies Veeam, Acronis, and HYCU.

But Druva, which has over 800 employees, believes it can continue to stand out in a crowded field. In December 2019, the company surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue and claims to have grown since then, with a 26% uptick in a customer base of thousands of companies over the last year. In March, Druva crossed 2.5 billion annual backups, experiencing a 40% increase in daily backup activity over the last 12 months alone. Singh says the platform now performs over 7 million backups per day.

“The global pandemic and unprecedented events of 2020 have ushered in a generational cloud transformation for businesses, with data’s increasing value at the heart of it,” Singh told VentureBeat via email. “Businesses today need a new approach to data protection which can be deployed from anywhere, protect data everywhere and securely scale on-demand. Only solutions built natively in the cloud are able to deliver all this functionality.”

Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and Neuberger Berman co-led Druva’s latest round of fundraising. It brings the company’s total raised to date to $475 million, following a $130 million series G round in June 2019.