A team of founders who sold their last company to Amazon to build a new business within AWS are embarking on a difficult reinvention of the business of backing up their organizations' cloud infrastructure. Today, Eon (as their new startup is called) has a product, a set of customers, three rounds of funding totaling $127 million, and a $750 million post-funding valuation. and has come out of stealth.
Specifically, Eon, which was recently founded in Israel and New York in January 2024, has raised $20 million in seed led by Sequoia (with participation from Vine Ventures, Meron Capital, and Eight Roads), and led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. A $30 million Series A (with participation from Sheva) and a $77 million Series B led by Greenoaks (with participation from Quiet Ventures).
Backing up infrastructure has long been a part of enterprise IT, going back to the days when most businesses were built around on-premises server architectures, software was installed via floppy disks, and the cloud was just what you saw. It has become a department. The sky outside the office window.
However, as Eon CEO Ofir Ehrlich explains, what was used as backup back then has not been well-reflected in the architecture of modern cloud environments as needs have become more complex. Small customers can store hundreds of terabytes of data on a single cloud provider, and when considering the entire network, the total amount of data exceeds hundreds of petabytes. The complete list of assets is also complex. This includes not only active apps, but also data that is not used on a daily basis but still needs access (“cold storage”), network appliances, edge devices, and more.
Customers are spending billions of dollars on infrastructure, which is expected to reach $838 billion by 2034. Budgets associated with backup efforts are also increasing, not only because of the size of the infrastructure, but also because of the increased cybersecurity risks. This is “driven by both internal compliance (what organizations think they need to do to keep things running) and external compliance,” Ehrlich said. He estimates that around 10-30% of infrastructure budgets are spent on backup.
But saying all of this needs to be addressed is easier said than done, and up until now it has probably been easier to identify than to actually do it.
Ehrlich, along with Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi, previously founded a recovery services startup called CloudEndure, which Amazon paid approximately $250 million in 2019 to build its own products within AWS. The company was acquired for USD. Ehrlich believed everything was resolved at the time, and Eon's focus on infrastructure backup was born out of a real and humbling experience.
Ehrlich recalled that while at AWS, he heard that one of the company's major customers was facing a large-scale ransomware attack. (Ehrlich also declined to name any of Eon's current customers, so he said he could not name the company.)
“'Great,' I said to myself. 'This [ransomware attack] No, he wasn't happy about the attack, but “I knew they were as fully protected as possible,” he said in an interview.
So they called them to double check that everything was okay. And of course…it wasn't.
The disaster recovery services offered by AWS only cover what Ehrlich calls “top-level” data, and he believes that with every backup vendor on the market, customers would be able to cover everything else. I did. “Apparently, they had a big gap.” What it means: Over the years between setting up backup services and ransomware attacks, customers have changed a lot of things, even closed some apps. , opened other apps, and moved data.
Eon hasn't detailed how it's working to solve this problem at this time, but as the CEO explains, this will depend on technical expertise, how data is stored in the cloud, He says it's a combination of product experience in understanding how things are accessed, and “breakthroughs” in the cloud. The format is what he calls a “new approach to storage and secondary storage,” allowing Eon to efficiently map the entire infrastructure without having to continually write and rewrite data. method allows you to observe and understand. He said he has applied for numerous patents on the method.
“In an industry where file recovery can take weeks, Eon's novel backup solution instantly locates data, saving our customers time, money and compliance headaches,” said Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital. stated in a statement. “With a world-class team led by cloud pioneers Ofir, Gonen and Ron, Eon is bringing the next generation of cloud backup management to market.”