Zerto Closes $15 Million in Series B Funding

Earlier this summer, Zerto Ltd. launched a bold reinvention of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) technology in order to meet the needs of virtualized data centers and cloud environments.

The company announces the completion of a $15 million Series B funding round led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) alongside existing investors Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.

In addition, Zerto announces the commercial availability of ‘Zerto Virtual Replication,’ an hypervisor-based replication solution for large enterprises.

"With many companies seeking to move their critical applications to virtualized and cloud-based environments, the lack of adequate BC/DR solutions has been a major impediment," said Jacques Benkoski, Ph.D., Venture Partner at USVP. "We are pleased to be able to invest in an experienced team and a solution that enables the next major wave of virtualization and cloud adoption by Fortune 500 companies."

Zerto Virtual Replication is a hypervisor-based solution, meaning that replication happens within the virtual infrastructure of the data center, as opposed to the physical storage arrays. By moving replication to the hypervisor, companies gain all of the benefits of virtualization such as flexibility, mobility and scalability in their disaster recovery solutions. Until now, the most common replication technologies for BC/DR were tied to the physical environment. They were not optimized for virtual environments, leading to operational and organizational challenges. Zerto’s hypervisor-based replication changes this by combining the enterprise-class features of physical replication with the flexibility, ease of management and control, and scalability of virtual environments. Zerto’s solution meets the performance and compliance criteria that large companies have when protecting mission-critical applications.

"It is an honor to welcome USVP and specifically Jacques, who has considerable domain expertise, to our board," said Ziv Kedem, founder and CEO, Zerto. "The Series B funding round helps Zerto ramp up to meet demand from direct and channel customers. We’ve worked with great beta customers to get to where we are, and are very pleased to announce that the Zerto Virtual Replication product is ready for prime time."

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Born in 2010, Zerto has dual headquarters in Herzelia, Israel and Waltham, MA, two cities well-known for their storage activity.

It got few months ago $6.2 million for a first round on investment from Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners.

The company was founded by CEO Ziv Kedem and his brother CTO Oded Kedem, who previously co-founded Kashya, which was sold to EMC for $153 million in 2006 and at the origin of EMC RecoverPoint.

At the heart of patent-pending replication technology is the Zerto Virtual Replication Appliance, a software installed on each host, capable of protecting all the VMs on that host. The VRA continuously replicates data from VMs and VMDKs selected by the user, compressing it and sending it to the remote site over WAN.

Replication is performed in a near synchronous manner without a snapshot or CBT mechanism, avoiding impact on application performance. VRAs on different hosts communicate between themselves, synchronizing replication to ensure block-level consistency between different VMs located on different hosts and storage arrays. Hypervisor-based replication is agnostic to storage source and destination, natively supporting virtualization platform features including VMotion, storage VMotion, high availability, and clustering.