Cloud services remain a weak spot for businesses when it comes to security, and companies that offer effective solutions to address this continue to attract significant interest in the market from both customers and investors.
The latest example is Odaseva, which has raised $54 million in funding and focuses on one use case: securing Salesforce environments.
The round was led by Silver Lake Waterman, with participation from existing investors F-Prime, Eight Roads and Serena Capital, as well as new investors Eurazeo and Crescent Cove.
Odaseba has raised $90 million to date. The company has not disclosed its valuation, but founder and CEO Sovan Bin said Pitchbook's pre-money estimate of less than $100 million was definitely wrong. Given that this Series C comes on the back of the company's strong momentum, the valuation is likely to be much higher. The company is expected to surpass 100 million users in November 2022 and counts hotel giants Accor, Schneider Electric, and Michelin among its clients.
Odaseba has an interesting background to the founding of the startup.
Binh worked at Salesforce more than 12 years ago, when the CRM giant was already big but not as big as it is today. There, he was based in Paris and tasked with helping some of Salesforce's biggest customers (including Schneider Electric, then Salesforce's largest customer in the world) figure out how to use Salesforce and make it as secure as the collection of on-premise solutions it replaced.
Binh said he found that Schneider and other companies were using a mix of different solutions to secure their environments. These solutions were point solutions, but they were used around vulnerabilities rather than specific application points of use.
“They wanted a single platform to address all their security requirements, from cyber to data protection to failover management, without them having to hunt around,” he said. “But most vendors, especially in the cloud, don't seem to be specialized in focusing on large enterprises in this way.”
His approach was to build solutions that addressed Salesforce and its peculiarities and use cases, based on a deep understanding of Salesforce.
It worked, and he realized he could make a bigger business out of selling the solution to other companies. Thus, Odaseva was born in Paris, then moved to San Francisco to be closer to more customers in the U.S. Today, the company's products include data protection (including backup and restore services), zero trust data security, data archiving, data compliance (sure to grow with regulation), and data platform services (including sandbox seeding, automation, and more).
Bin is French-Cambodian and the company name, Odaseva, is a combination of words from both languages and is very much a lateral extension of the company's mission statement: “Oda is based on the French word for 'boldness' and 'siva' comes from a very old Cambodian language, Sanskrit, and it means trying to help the community and help our elders in a very selfless way. In simple terms, it means trying to be innovative when thinking about the success of our customers.”
As Salesforce has grown in revenue and scope over the past 12 years — it generated more than $9 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter and has grown its full-year revenue more than 13-fold since 2012 as it has expanded the range of services it offers its users — Odaseva is no different. But so are others who see an opportunity here.
There are a number of companies offering security solutions tailored to Salesforce users and environments, including AppOmni, WithSecure, Opswat, Varonis, and even Salesforce itself. But the startup doesn't seem scared of the competitive landscape. Bin says the addressable market is large enough that Odaseva might consider tackling other SaaS applications in the future, but there are no plans to do so at the moment.
One other thing to note here: Odaseva's funding is also significant in the context of a larger market environment. The pendulum in enterprise IT over the past few years has been swinging away from point solutions and towards platforms. The trend is that budgets are constrained, buyers are looking for all-in-one solutions that are much easier (and therefore cheaper) to procure and operate, and so we're seeing a consolidation underway where more point solutions (serving narrower use cases) come together under a larger umbrella.
Odasewa's focus and success in pursuing it suggests there are still great opportunities for players who don't buy into that narrative.
“The Odaseba team has built a leading data resiliency platform for the Salesforce ecosystem, providing security and continuity solutions for mission-critical applications,” Sean O'Neill, managing director and group head at Silver Lake Waterman, said in a statement. “Sovan and the Odaseba leadership team have a proven track record of building value and trust with enterprise customers around the world, and we are excited to partner with the team to drive further growth.”