Druva, an enterprise backup solutions provider, has raised $12 million in series B round of funding, led by venture capital firm Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital. The monies will be used to expand its product portfolio and enhance sales and marketing operations across North America, EMEA and the Asia-Pacific.
Druva had raised angel funding from Indian Angel Network (IAN) and $5 million (around Rs 22.3 crore) in the series A from Sequoia in April last year.
Founded in 2007 by former Veritas employees – Jaspreet Singh (now Druva’s CEO), Ramani Kothandaraman (COO) and Milind Borate (CTO), Druva started as a disaster recovery management firm and focused on enterprise data backup software products, as well as security products.
According to Singh, this round of funding will be utilised to pursue clients aggressively in the US and European markets. The company, reportedly growing at 35 per cent quarter-on-quarter, also expects to make a VP-level hire for the US sales. Druva has sold its products to 800 customers till date and has grown from around 18 to 80 employees in the last one year.
Around 40 per cent of Druva’s revenues come from the USA while 35 per cent comes from Europe and the rest from the Asia-Pacific. Its biggest clients are the world’s largest oilfield services player Schlumberger and Emerson Network Power. Other clients include US Marine Corps, NASA, Xerox, MetLife, Capita and KPMG, among others.
Druva’s flagship product inSync is a laptop backup solution to protect corporate data for office and remote users. It is also available on the Cloud platform. It uses global data de-duplication to save over 90 per cent bandwidth and storage, and provides instant data access over Web, PC, smartphone and Tablet. The firm also offers add-on products, such as inSync SafePoint, which helps encrypt, delete and track stolen or lost data.
Druva has recently launched Phoenix, which provides non-disruptive disk-to-disk backup for local and remote servers (as in local offices and branches). This product has also received good response from clients like Schlumberger and HDFC.
“As the data explosion continues, along with the proliferation of endpoint device types and workforce mobility, Druva has demonstrated a unique capability to address the challenges associated with enterprise backup and endpoint data protection. Compared to other industry solutions, Druva’s disruptive innovation reduces the storage footprint and bandwidth requirement for backup by orders of magnitude. With wide adoption of its on-premise and Cloud-based solutions, the fast-growing company is racking up an impressive list of reference customers,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Principal at Nexus Venture Partners, who joins the company board.
“We are very impressed with Druva’s early success in over a dozen countries, the foundation of which is a superior technical approach to backup and an enterprise-grade product that is very easy to use. We now expect the company to invest significantly in sales and marketing to grow the business in a high-growth segment of the backup industry and a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity,” said Shailendra Singh, managing director at Sequoia Capital.
“Organisations are waking up to the fact that they have important data resident on endpoint devices and that data might not be adequately protected, although that should be. Loss of data resident on endpoint devices can prove to be devastating,” said Sheila Childs, vice-president (research) with analyst firm Gartner, in a recent research report. “Many mobile workers are high contributors to the success of the business, and carry data on their laptops that would be difficult to reconstruct if the device is destroyed or stolen,” the report added.
