VMworld: $51 Million in Funding for Start-Up Clumio

Clumio, Inc., in authentic SaaS for enterprise backup, announced $51 million in funding from Silicon Valley investors and officially launched its backup as a service product.

With this new service, enterprises can eliminate hardware and software for on-premise backup and avoid the complexity and cost of running 3rd party backup software in the cloud. By taking advantage of cloud scale, economics, and elasticity, there is now a secure and efficient way to protect on-premise, VMware Cloud for AWS, and native AWS service workloads.

Clumio was founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Poojan Kumar, co-founder and former CEO of PernixData,acquired by Nutanix, alongside Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil who bring engineering and leadership backgrounds from VMware and Nutanix.

The company announced $51 million in funding received over 2 rounds: a Sutter Hill Ventures-led series A round and a series B round driven by Index Ventures with significant participation from Sutter Hill Ventures. Several individuals experienced at investing in technologies also participated including Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Technologies, and John Thompson, COB at Microsoft.

Clumio is a secure, backup as a service that consolidates the protection of an enterprise data center and any remote sites with no hardware or software to size, configure, manage – or even buy at all. As enterprises move aggressively to cloud, they can use it to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services.

Clumio architecture

Authentic SaaS protects data regardless of where it resides
and delivers these benefits to the enterprise:
• Easy to Manage – setup and start protecting data in less than 15 minutes
• Predictable Costs – pay for the service based on the number of VMs protected
• Scale On-Demand – resources automatically adapt to meet requirements
• Global Compliance – create one policy to apply to VMs on-premise and in the cloud
• Always-On Security – all backups are encrypted in-transit, and at rest

“Enterprise workloads are being ‘SaaS-ified’ because IT can no longer afford the time, complexity and expense of building and managing heavy on-prem hardware and software solutions if they are to successfully deliver against their digital transformation initiatives,” said Poojan Kumar, Clumio co-founder and CEO. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. We have and can leverage the most secure and innovative cloud services available, now and in the future, within our service to ensure that we can meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”

“In our business, IT is a differentiator so we look to SaaS offerings for reliability, scalability, and simplicity,” said Marcus Johnston, CSO, Infogix, Inc. “The Clumio backup as a service offering removes infrastructure complexity from day to day operations by providing cloud-native backup and an easy to use management interface for our workloads. Our developers can now focus on building the apps that deliver the most business value to us.“

IDC estimates the global market for SaaS applications revenues (1) is expected to increase from approximately $100 billion in 2018 to more than $185 billion by 2022.

Clumio is positioned to take advantage of this trend, giving enterprises a fast and effective way to make progress against organizational mandates to move workloads to the cloud or minimize the amount of time they spend on applications and operations that are not core to their businesses.

According to IDC, the Data Protection as a Service market (2) – which includes spend on backup, and DR cloud services – will grow to over $10 billion by 2022. Enterprises have already moved CRM, IT service management, HR and data warehouse workloads to the cloud. Clumio’s mission is to do the same for this market.

“No longer do organizations need to purchase single-purpose hardware and software for backup and recovery requirements,” said Andrew Smith, research manager, IDC infrastructure olatforms and technologies group. “In many cases, they can quickly and cost-efficiently rely on cloud services. As a result of this consumption change, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in thinking in terms of the best way for IT and line of business buyers to leverage cloud services for workloads like backup and DR. As a result of this shift, we forecast that the backup as a services market will experience a double-digit CAGR over the next 5 years – far outpacing the growth of the traditional data replication and protection software segment.“

Like other companies that have moved enterprise workloads such as CRM, HR, IT service management, and data warehouses to a software as a service model, Clumio is born in the cloud. With hardware and software logistics, implementation, and costs out of the way, firm’s channel partners and solutions providers can focus more directly on solving the problems of their enterprise customers, quickly transitioning their own business models to take advantage of the cloud opportunity in the process.

“As enterprise companies have increasingly turned to public cloud to solve business problems and deliver business value, it also becomes necessary for them to rethink data protection. Clumio delivers solutions that address backup and recovery on-prem and in the public cloud without planning, sizing and implementation complexities,” noted Thompson, CEO, Groupware Technology, Inc.

(1) IDC, Worldwide Software as a Service and Cloud Software Forecast, 2019 – Market Forecast 2019-2023 ($4,500)
(2) IDC, Worldwide Data Protection as a Service Forecast, 2018-2022: Initial Market Sizing, #US44108018, July 2018 ($4,500)

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Clumio, Stealthy Start-Up Preparing Public Cloud SaaS Data Platform
Co-founded by former executives of Nutanix, PernixData and VMware
by Jean Jacques Maleval | July 22, 2018 | News