Druva Secures $147 Million Investment, Total at $475 Million
Valuation of company above $2 billion
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on April 22, 2021 at 2:00 pmDruva Inc. announced a $147 million investment as the company rapidly scales in response to accelerated demand for its platform.
The fundraise was led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), a global investment group, with a significant investment by Neuberger Berman Group LLC, each of which manage more than $300 billion in net assets.
The round, which raises the company’s valuation above $2 billion, also included participation from existing investors Viking Global Investors and Atreides Management LP.
As organizations move workloads to cloud environments, adopt SaaS solutions, and combat rising cyber threats, this new investment will fuel expansion of firm’s Cloud Platform to meet today’s needs, and extend the company’s industry leadership as it defines tomorrow’s data protection.
Over the last 12 months, enterprises have moved swiftly to adopt cloud solutions to strengthen business resilience, maintain critical business operations, and support hybrid work models. Based on this demand, Gartner, Inc. forecasts cloud adoption will reach a 5-year of 20.7%.* As data grows exponentially in parallel to this new operating model, traditional data protection based on hardware and software is no longer scalable or cost-effective. Instead, businesses need a new approach which can be deployed from anywhere, protect data across the enterprise, and deliver it securely as a service. Solutions built natively in the cloud will be able to successfully deliver all this functionality and, 40% of organizations will supplement or completely replace traditional backup applications with cloud-based solutions by 2022, according to Gartner, Inc.**
“Rising volumes of stored data, rapid adoption of cloud and deployment of SaaS applications, regulatory frameworks and cybersecurity concerns have accelerated the demand for data protection and management solutions for businesses,” said Alexandre Synnett, EVP and CTO, CDPQ. “The working-from-home dynamic experienced globally has further accentuated the need for cloud-based data protection solutions and we believe Druva is in an excellent position to seize opportunities and enhance its clients’ agility and data compliance.”
With the ability to deliver faster time to value and help businesses manage, protect, and govern critical data during their digital transformation efforts, Druva Cloud Platform’s customer base has expanded substantially during 2020, while the adoption of multiple Cloud Platform products has increased by 50% in the same time period. In the last year, the company’s data under management has grown by more than 40% as it supports industry leaders, disruptors, and pioneers including GameStop, Marriott, NASA, National Cancer Institute, Pfizer, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, and Zoom.
“We have been extremely impressed by Druva’s talented management team, leading technology, and ongoing innovation in serving the enterprise market,” said Charles Kantor, MD, Neuberger Berman. “We believe we are in the early innings of enterprises shifting workloads to the cloud, and Druva’s proprietary solutions position the company for long-term success. We look forward to providing our experienced market perspectives to management as Druva marks this important inflection point in its growth trajectory.”
“The unprecedented events of 2020 have ushered in a generational cloud transformation for businesses, and data’s increasing value is at the very heart of it,” said Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO, Druva. “Druva pioneered the cloud data protection category almost a decade ago and has led the way in defining the architecture, business model, and user experience our customers now expect. This investment and our continued, rapid growth is further validation of our vision for a simple, open, and unified data protection and management platform.”
“The last 12 months have underscored how organizational agility is at a premium, and IT leaders are increasingly turning to cloud technologies to increase business resilience and velocity,” said Phil Goodwin, research director, IDC. “Companies able to simplify complex data protection processes, particularly by leveraging the cloud, can gain strategic advantage through better data availability and Druva Cloud Platform is architected to make it a compelling choice for organizations navigating cloud migrations.”
*Gartner, Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2019-2025, 1Q21 Update, ID G00743201. published March 25, 2021
**Gartner, 2020 Strategic Roadmap for Storage, ID G00722078. published January 1, 2020
Comments
Druva confirms its challenger position with this new round - series H - and reaches a new level of valuation around $2 billion according to the press release.
It also means that the company raises globally $475 million that we translate immediately on the valuation over total VC money to obtain a ratio of 4.2.
It's suprising that the company didn't choose the IPO path, this round is noted H which means 9 rounds. So why tis new round and why not IPO? Is it due to the business climate or financial conditions and perspective? As series H should surprise readers, note that Druva didn't use this word or terminology in their press release probably because of the potential effect it could generate...
The table below summarizes investments injected in the company.
This valuation invites the company in a small group of data protection players but also put the pressure as this amount means some potential difficulties ahead like the wish to later do an IPO as the valuation is already very high and even an exit could be tough. We don't see someone who wish to acquire Druva for this amount or even half of it. The belongs to the Storage Unicorn club since June 2019, almost 2 years ago, published bi-annually by Coldago Research.
Druva had globally several lives. The trajectory of the company - Druvaa at that time, simplified in 2010 in Druva - is interesting with a start in Pune, India in 2008, 13 years ago, following some time spent at Veritas Software by the 3 founders. At that time, the solution addressed some vertical needs in financial sector with a endpoint data protection solution. The product, named inSync, targeted enterprise laptops, PCs, smartphones and tablets and Druva has morphed a lot since this period.
The company has surfed on consecutives market's waves to add key features organically or by acquisitions. Some time later, the team released Phoenix, a server backup product to extend enterprise needs especially for bare metal and virtual environments. Recognized for its de-dupe engine, an obvious need for remote offices, the engineering teams added successfully CDP, DR, fast files search, bare metal restore, eDiscovery, compliance, NAS support coupled with an intuitive Web gui.
Here is the list of Druva's acquisitions illustrating the search of small and agile specialists:
- In 2020 sfApex, a salesforce data protection specialist,
- In 2019 CloudLanes, a cloud VTL player for Azure,
- And in 2018 CloudRanger, a backup vendor with expertise in AWS.
Following these sequential additions for enterprise needs, the firm has started the Druva Cloud Platform (DCP) as a clear shift towards the cloud supporting AWS and strengthened by the CloudRanger acquisition. The DCP solution also presents some security capabilities, ransomware protection and more recently protects Kubernetes-based environments as well. Acting as a real SaaS service, DCP supports also SaaS applications such Office 365 or Salesforce.
It illustrates the active battle among players and the specific pick of special players to feed DCP. It confirms that the Build, Buy or Partner common strategy is well mastered by the management team.
DCP runs on AWS operating like a full cloud native service so offered as-a-Service. So far AWS is supported and we don't yet see Azure or GCP. Anticipate some new rapid developments from the company and we even think some acquisitions could arrive onboard to create some new differentiators and maintain its unique market position.
The company trajectory had a special year in 2019 when the ARR surpassed $100 million. And we estimate a rapid growth during the last 18 months capitalizing on a strong and comprehensive offering. Even if the product is well respected, the company continues to be a bit confidential confirming that the CMO and is team struggles a bit in that mission.
Being one of the few modern data protection key players in this recent market dynamic with all the features available, Druva operates now as a global data governance, management and protection for enterprises and we'll monitor carefully how Atempo, Commvault, Clumio, Cohesity, HYCU, Rubrik, Veeam and even Veritas will react.
Historical records in total financial funding for storage start-ups
| Start-ups | Total financial funding* |
| Dropbox | 1,700 |
| Cloudera | 1,041 |
| Cohesity |
660 |
| Kaseya | 567 |
| Box | 554 |
| Rubrik | 553 |
| Pillar Data | 544 |
| Veeam | 500 |
| Druva | 475 |
(in $ million)
(Source: StorageNewsletter.com)
$147 million is the second highest financial round in 2021 by a storage start-up in 2021 after $167.5 million received by Ownbackup.
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