Cloud DR Start-Up Arpio Raises $8.2 Million in Seed Round

Headquartered in Durham, NC, Arpio announced a $8.2 million seed round led by S3 Ventures and Companyon Ventures, alongside TDF Ventures and CreativeCo Capital.

Existing investors YCombinator, Uncorrelated Ventures, Valor Ventures, and Triangle Tweener Fund also participated.

Over the past year, the start-up has tripled revenue and grown to over 50 enterprise customers – including Choice Hotels, 23andMe, Ricoh, and SAS – who use the platform to quickly deploy and automatically manage their AWS DR environments.

It was recently recognized in Gartner’s 2023 Hype Cycle in the emerging Cloud Infrastructure Recovery Assurance Software category and leads G2’s ranking in customer satisfaction for DRaaS solutions.

“With increasing cybercrime, customer requirements, and regulation, BC is now top-of-mind for cloud customers of all types and sizes,” said Eric Engineer, partner, S3 Ventures. “When we analyzed the cloud DR space and spoke to users, it became clear that Arpio is the market’s most comprehensive and easy-to-use solution. They are democratizing DR – providing push-button access to modern, sophisticated automation that is otherwise out of reach for most teams.”

Co-founders Doug Neumann and Shaw Terwilliger previously worked together at Microsoft and then at Bandwidth – where they faced the time-intensive and complex challenge of setting up, testing, and maintaining DR automation in the cloud, and then faced an unrecoverable outage.

“DR is a requirement for most mission-critical applications, but we found that legacy tools didn’t work for the cloud,” said Neumann, CEO, Arpio. “They backup servers and data, but leave all of the surrounding cloud infrastructure to users. This means more work for infrastructure engineers, slower recovery times, and more risk exposure. So we created Arpio, the first DR solution designed specifically for cloud workloads.“

With Arpio, organizations can set up multi-region, multi-account DR in minutes – instead of months. True to its original mission, the firm backups everything needed to fully recover cloud applications – data, servers, and infrastructure – including identity, networking, and configurations. For added security, all data remains in the customer environment; backups are vaulted and air-gapped, further ensuring recovery in case of ransomware or corruption.

“Any downtime for us means lost revenue and frustrated customers,” said Jason Simpson, VP engineering, Choice Hotels International, an Arpio customer. “Arpio’s automated DR solution gives us the confidence that our systems will continue to operate if disaster strikes. And because it’s so easy to set up, manage, and test, we will save hundreds of hours of engineering time per year.“

With the funds, Arpio will continue to expand their AWS service coverage, increase automation, and invest in go-to-market.