Backupify Closes $900K Seed Round

Backupify, an online data backup and storage provider for businesses to seamlessly back up their critical cloud data, announced that it has closed a Seed Round of $900,000.

The company, which launched in June 2009 with a sole focus on the consumer market, will use much of the funding to create services for business customers, the first being an automated solution for business customers to back up their enterprise data that already resides in the cloud.

First Round Capital led the round, with investments from General Catalyst Partners, Betaworks and individual investors Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Andy Swan and Bob Saunders. Charlie O’Donnell from First Round will sit on the Board of Directors and Josh Kopelman from First Round and David Orfao from General Catalyst Partners will join the company’s Board of Directors as observers.

Businesses have embraced moving critical information to the cloud. They are increasingly using services such as Google Docs, Gmail and Twitter to power traditional business functions, while also adopting services such as YouTube for corporate videos and WordPress for corporate blog entries. While most business users aren’t concerned about losing this data after all, one of the key benefits of cloud applications is that the data is, ostensibly, backed up – they are concerned about losing control of it. Threats such as hacking, SLA issues or even data loss due to user error further compound their concerns.

"With businesses moving their critical data to the cloud, the time is right for Backupify to expand its services, and First Round Capital is very pleased to lead this round," said Josh Kopelman, founding partner for First Round Capital. "Backupify’s consumer offering has seen tremendous adoption and the company’s expansion will give businesses customers a key benefit that had been missing from the cloud’complete control of their key information."

"Businesses are recognizing the importance of securing and controlling their data, whether its on their servers or, increasingly, in the cloud," said David Orfao, managing director at General Catalyst Partners. "We look forward to guiding Backupify through its expansion into the SMB and enterprise markets."

Beyond control, there is the issue of compliance: industries such as financial services must meet stringent requirements for archiving all employee communications. And while social media networks are quickly finding their way into business communications, they lack any sort of mechanism to easily store all of this information.

"The move to the cloud is something that most companies see as a mixed blessing. The benefits are obvious, but the loss of control of company data can be daunting," said Rob May, the CEO and co-founder of Backupify. "C-level executives at prospective customers have told us that while they trusted that backups of their critical data were happening, they would still feel more comfortable if they had a copy of the data that they themselves controlled, and would be willing to pay for that peace-of-mind. The opportunity here is immense, and this round of funding will help us to seize that."

In conjunction with the launch of its corporate offering, Backupify will also be partnering with enterprise software-as-a-service (Saas) vendors to provide them with a turnkey, third-party data backup solution for their customers.

Previously Backupify had raised an angel round from Dharmesh Shah, CTO of Hubspot; Sean O’Leary and Sterling Lapinski, Co-Founders of Genscape; and Vik Chadha, Co-Founder of Glowtouch.