- Clumio, an innovator of an authentic SaaS for enterprise backup, announced it raised $135 million in Series C funding
Clumio — the innovators of an authentic SaaS for enterprise backup — announced it has raised $135 million in Series C funding. This round of funding comes on the heels of the company launching out of stealth mode in August.
And in a very short amount of time, Clumio has seen a strong market response and rapid enterprise customer adoption for its secure backup as a service thus highlighting the importance of the data protection problem that Clumio set out to solve. And this momentum attracted the new round of funding, which will enable Clumio to accelerate its vision to deliver a globally consolidated data protection service in and for the public cloud.
Clumio works as a secure backup-as-a-service that consolidates the protection of an enterprise data center and any remote sites with no hardware or software to size, configure, manage or even buy at all. And as enterprises move aggressively to cloud, they can use Clumio to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services. Authentic SaaS protects data regardless of where it resides and delivers critical benefits to the enterprise.
The Series C round of funding was led by Sutter Hill Ventures managing director Mike Speiser and new investor Altimeter Capital. Existing investor Index Ventures also joined the round. This round of funding more than triples Clumio’s funding to date for a total of $186 million through three rounds.
“Enterprise IT can no longer afford the time, complexity and expense of building and managing data protection solutions on-prem or in the cloud,” said Clumio CEO and co-founder Poojan Kumar. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. This round of investment allows us to push that advantage as we accelerate our development and go to market strategy while continuing to meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”
IDC is estimating that the global market for SaaS applications revenues is expected to increase from approximately $100 billion in 2018 to more than $185 billion by 2022. And IDC also reported that the Data Protection as a Service market — which includes spend on backup and disaster recovery cloud services — is going to grow to over $10 billion by 2022. Plus enterprises have already moved CRM, IT service management, HR and data warehouse workloads to the cloud. Clumio has a mission to do the same for this large market.
Clumio is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this trend as it gives enterprises a fast and effective way to make progress against organizational mandates in order to move workloads to the cloud or minimize the amount of time they spend on applications and operations that are not core to their businesses.
“Similar to Snowflake disrupting the data warehousing market by leveraging the scale, elasticity and economics of the public cloud, Clumio is building a globally consolidated data protection service the right way,” added Mike Speiser, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures. “Harnessing the full power of the public cloud, they are reimagining the backup experience for the enterprise paying particular attention to security, predictable costs and simplicity for their customers.”
With this round of funding, Clumio plans to accelerate the growth of its engineering team at its headquarters in Santa Clara, CA and in its new development center in Bangalore, India. And the company is planning to expand its go to market and service operations in the U.S. And the company is going to add more support for its 100% channel strategy with additional partner resources and programs and build upon momentum in technology partner programs with AWS, VMware, etc. Plus Clumio is going to introduce support for new workloads as it continues to execute against its vision for a globally consolidated data protection service.
SaaS Backup For AWS
Clumio also announced a secure SaaS Backup for AWS that eclipses snapshot only protection strategies to reduce risk of data loss, increase security, and lower retention costs. Enterprises moving to the public cloud often depend on snapshots to protect data against loss, security, and compliance risks. And while this is good for fast restoration of data to a specific point in time, this strategy opens vulnerabilities to bad actors thus giving them access to both data and snapshots in the same cloud account. From a longer term, snapshot retention is limited and costly and they are useless for single file restore or global search capabilities. Plus managing snapshots per account, per region, and per cloud is left to the end user. Clumio SaaS fixes these challenges by securely protecting native AWS services, VMware Cloud on AWS, and on-prem data center workloads with a single backup service.
“Copying the complexity of your on-prem backup infrastructure to the cloud becomes a difficult and very expensive task when you consider that the typical enterprise uses more than one public cloud and could have thousands of cloud accounts across multiple regions,” said Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst and Founding Partner, Futuruum Research. “Snapshot protection alone is not enough, yet who wants to spend precious IT resources building and maintaining backup software in the cloud. SaaS is being rapidly adopted to solve enterprise problems and backup is a very good candidate for that strategy.”
And with the addition of EBS as a data source, Clumio customers can consistently protect volumes in the AWS public cloud alongside their VMware on-prem and VMware Cloud on AWS virtual machines. The simplicity of data protection in the public cloud is essential for enterprises and with Clumio’s global policy management across all data assets, the complexity of account-based snapshot management is alleviated. In order to ensure data is secure and protected against ransomware and bad actors, all of the data is encrypted at rest and in-flight with backup data residing outside of the customer’s AWS account in an immutable format.
“Enterprises demand data protection built from the cloud up to ensure data is protected in a simple and scalable way, as they accelerate their journey to the public cloud,” added Chadd Kenney, VP and Chief Technologist at Clumio. “Traditional backup solutions retrofitted for the cloud burden the user with the same technical debt and complexity they are trying to get away from in the first place. Clumio SaaS transforms the enterprise backup experience optimizing for simplicity and security.”
The Clumio SaaS essentially provides an entirely new backup experience to enterprise customers from proactive support to transparent over-the-air software upgrades. And unlike the ineffective “call home” alerting provided by legacy hardware vendors, the Clumio experience includes continuous 24/7 monitoring of task and environmental issues and triggers for the creation of proactive support tickets. Plus the users avoid the complexities of upgrading legacy backup products including planned downtime, on-call administrators, validation testing, and service downtime. The patches, upgrades, and fixes from Clumio are all delivered seamlessly over-the-air with no complicated upgrade planning required.
“As we continue to move aggressively to the cloud, it is important that we make sure that we are taking maximum advantage of the elasticity, economics and scale that the cloud has to offer,” explained Jim Boyer, CIO/VP of Information Technology at Rush Memorial Hospital. “When data is dispersed across regions and accounts and is expensive to move, a SaaS application like Clumio that is wholly focused on data protection will allow us to more quickly execute on strategic initiatives. My team also has tremendous appreciation for the simplicity and function of the Clumio service. The Clumio support experience is unique and prescriptive and they remediate issues in a timely manner.”
