Cloud Data Protection Firm Druva Rakes In $80 Mn From Riverwood Capital, Others

Cloud data protection and management firm Druva has raised $80 Mn in growth equity funding in a round led by Riverwood Capital. The round also saw participation from Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and most other existing venture investors. This round brings the total funding raised by Druva to nearly $200 Mn.

The data protection firm will use the proceeds to accelerate research and development, expand go-to-market efforts worldwide and lead the industry in redefining how enterprises protect, manage and use their data.

Jeff Parks, co-founder and General Partner at Riverwood Capital stated, “Cloud data protection and management solutions are massively disrupting the secondary storage industry. Druva delivers an as-a-service protection and management solution for all enterprise data encompassing infrastructure, endpoints, and cloud applications. We are impressed by Druva’s ability to help organisations redefine their data protection and management strategy in a cloud-first world, leveraging the performance, scale, ease of use and Total Cost of  Ownership (TCO) benefits of the public cloud and SaaS.”

Additionally, this month Druva also announced the launch of Druva Cloud Platform Tech Preview. It delivers a single-pane-of-glass view for protection and management of endpoints, servers and cloud applications.

Milind Borate, co-founder and CTO at Druva stated, “With the proliferation of ransomware and the need for governance and compliance around initiatives like GDPR, Druva’s innovations are well-positioned to serve this growing market. Druva Cloud Platform is the next generation of cloud data protection and management, completely delivered as a service.”

Druva’s Growth Fuelled By A Growing Data Protection Industry

Druva was founded in 2008 by Jaspreet Singh, Milind Borate, and Ramani Kothandaraman and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with additional offices in India, the UK, Germany, Singapore, Japan and Australia. It offers cloud data protection and information management, leveraging the public cloud to offer a single pane of glass to protect, preserve, and discover information.

Its success is fuelled partly by the rapid expansion of the data protection industry, which is expected to grow to $28 Bn in 2022 for both cloud-based and on-premises servers as per an Allied Market Research, “Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) Market,” January 2017 report.

The rise is also fuelled by the rapid cloud data protection and management adoption by Global 5000 organisations. The company has hugely benefited because of this, realising more than 300% year-over-year growth in infrastructure data protection revenue. Today, Druva Cloud deployments span more than 4,000 enterprise customers, including 10% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies such as Continental, Emerson, Flex, Fujitsu and Lockheed Martin. Today, the total data protected by Druva reportedly exceeds 40 petabytes.

No wonder, the startup has been receiving venture capital support throughout, as more and more organisations now need seamless solutions to solve their most complex data protection problems. Last September it had raised $51 Mn in funding led by existing investor Sequoia India. Prior to that in April 2016, it raised a strategic investment from NTT Finance, the financial arm of Japanese telecommunications company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation.

While the company’s valuation post this round was not disclosed, it was estimated to be around $637.5 Mn during its last round. It faces competition from players such as Rubrik which is now valued at $1.3 Bn after raising $180 Mn earlier this year and US-based Cohesity. However, with the rise of advanced data threats such as ransomware and the growing need for cloud data protection and management solutions, Druva’s growth trajectory is expected to continue as the data protection market heats up.