Clumio, a data backup and recovery provider for enterprises using the public cloud, has raised $75 million in a Series D round.
The increase comes as the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company quadrupled its annual recurring revenue (ARR) last year with new customers such as Atlassian, which now uses Clumio to enable cloud-based Jira projects. This was done in response to the claim. Management software.
The problems that Clumio and similar companies like Veeam and Rubrik are trying to solve are wide-ranging. While public cloud spending shows little sign of slowing down, businesses also face increasing threats related to ransomware, with most estimates suggesting that extortion gangs will enjoy a bumper crop in 2023. Masu. Additionally, there are also issues of data center disasters, such as the fire that struck his OVH in France in 2021, which took millions of websites offline and caused significant data loss.
Considering the growing set of regulations with strict data retention provisions, and the need for greater transparency in the snowballing generative AI movement, all of which can help businesses automate their data backups. It's a rich environment for companies like Clumio to thrive. and recovery workflow.
Backed up
Founded in 2017, Clumio primarily works to protect workloads on Amazon's cloud infrastructure, but in 2020 it also introduced support for Microsoft 365. While it's true that AWS and its ilk offer native data backup across areas such as: Replication (objects are copied between buckets), Versioning (multiple versions of an object are kept in the same bucket), Object Locking (objects are stored “write once, read many times”). is typically used to resolve accidental data deletion. Overwrite — Typically reverts to a previous version and limits how a company can restore objects or entire buckets (data storage repositories) to a point in time of their choosing.
Additionally, it is important to store production (or “live”) and backup data in separate, secure domains, which many backup solutions (including first-party cloud providers themselves) do not do. . Therefore, if a breach occurs and security credentials are compromised across the organization, not only production data but also backups are effectively at risk.
“Clumio overcomes this challenge by providing a default, air-gapped, ‘immutable’ platform that keeps enterprise data safe from such adversarial incidents,” said Poojan Kumar, CEO of Clumio. told TechCrunch via email.
crumio dashboard image credits:Krumio
In fact, Clumio stores backup data in what Kumar calls a “super-optimized data plane” on AWS. “Unlike other vendors, we don't deploy heavy file system or compute into customer accounts to optimize storage,” he said. “We leverage his AWS serverless data processing engine to perform all core backup operations. That being said, we plan to expand our data plane to other clouds this year. ”
In that regard, many companies are actually building applications on infrastructure that spans cloud providers. For example, I'm deploying a Microsoft SQL Server database on an Amazon EC2 compute instance. This can result in “white spaces” in your backup scope where neither cloud provider backs up the full stack. This is something that Clumio is increasingly supporting as we expand our reach across cloud infrastructure and application environments.
Clumio has essentially focused on AWS to date, which is perhaps understandable for a startup looking to target the biggest slice of the cloud computing pie from the get-go, but Kumar says the platform is easy to use. It states that it is designed in such a way that it can be built on.Port to any cloud
“Our mission is to be the backup solution for any cloud, for any workload,” he said. “And this year, we are advancing that mission. We started with AWS, but we plan to soon expand to other major cloud providers as customer demand for these clouds grows.” .”
Clumo CEO Poojan Kumar (center) and co-founders Kaustubh Patil (left) and Eun Ho Jeong image credits:Krumio
risk situation
2023 was a hotbed of ransomware activity, with prolific gangs like Russia-linked Klopp exploiting software vulnerabilities to target hundreds of organizations, from hospitals to banks, universities and airlines. But holding data for ransom is just one of the immediate risks of not having adequate backup and recovery systems in place. Various regulations and standards, such as SOC2 and ISO27001, require companies to store and maintain data for a certain period of time for audit purposes.
And the OVH fire three years ago also demonstrated the importance of a robust data backup plan. A French cloud provider has won a lawsuit from a customer who paid for backups but lost data because OVH stored the backups on the same server. Live” production data.
In addition, the burgeoning AI revolution is giving rise to new regulations, such as the EU AI Act, which has strict provisions on traceability to document the origin of data used to develop a particular model. . This is so that we can document the origin of the data used to develop a particular model. It helps avoid the much-maligned “black box” problem and increases the trustworthiness of AI. And this could be a boon for his Clumio and its ilk, as companies look to pre-emptively identify, categorize and back up data sets even before regulations kick in.
“With the unstoppable power of generative AI and an unwavering focus on privacy, the regulatory environment is extremely fluid.” Kumar said. “We have well-known genomics customers who are using AI for drug discovery. They need to do it responsibly because the new regulations will require years, perhaps decades, of backward tracking. I would like to.”
Crumio said ARR is now “fairly close” to double-digit millions of dollars, increasing by 400% from 2022 to 2023, but could not provide specific numbers. The company has raised about $186 million to date, the majority of which came through a $135 million Series C round over four years ago. While startup funding typically increases as it progresses through rounds, Clumio's latest infusion is only about half of what it raised in 2019, reflecting how the global economic landscape has changed during this time. clearly reflected.
“The macro environment is very challenging. Capital is more expensive and the mantra of 'growth at all costs' has evolved into responsible growth,” Kumar said. “So even though we quadrupled our ARR and secured a net new investor on our cap table, we decided to appropriately raise our Series D.”
Still, $75 million is nothing to laugh at, and the money will be needed as Clumio looks to strengthen its market reach, both in terms of industry coverage and cloud support.
Clumio's Series D round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures with participation from Index Ventures, Altimeter Capital, and NewView Capital.