Exclusive Interview with Simon Taylor, CEO, HYCU

Simon Taylor is CEO and founder of HYCU Inc., based in Boston, MA, a company he founded in 2018. Before he was president of Comtrade Software, and spent time at Forrester Research, Omgeo and Putman Investments. He received an MBA in international business from IE (Instituto de Empresa) Business School and an undergraduate degree in operations technology from Northeastern University.

StorageNewsletter: What is new with HYCU, and what progress has been made since the introduction of R-Cloud?
Simon Taylor: R-Cloud changed what we are as a company. We stopped being a backup vendor with cloud reach and became a platform built for the way the modern stack actually works: any cloud, any SaaS, any system of record, one console. The last few quarters have been about proving that platform thesis. We closed FY’26 Q4 with 172% year-over-year gross new ARR growth. The field is executing, the enterprise motion is real, and we’ll be cash flow positive this year. For a venture-backed company in this category, that is the harder accomplishment than the growth rate.

What is HYCU’s install base, partners, and headcount?
HYCU has more than 4,600 customers across 78-plus countries worldwide. The shape of the base matters more than the count: midmarket regulated industries, heavy in financial services, healthcare, legal, public sector. Partner ecosystem of more than a hundred integrators and resellers globally, with deep technology relationships across the data protection stack anchoring our cyber resilience story. For headcount, we are deliberately holding tight. AI changes what a software company has to look like to compound, and we are running the experiment on ourselves first.

When will HYCU be profitable? Are you looking to raise another round of funding?
We’ll be cash flow positive this year. That is the answer to both questions. No plans to raise. We have the capital and runway to execute the plan and fund the HYCU aiR rollout internally.

How has AI changed the market?
LLMs did two things to our category. They put unstructured enterprise data on every CIO’s risk register, and they made every backup vendor that wasn’t already a platform look like a feature. Before LLMs went mainstream, data protection was an insurance conversation. After, the buyer started asking different questions. What is in our data? Who can access it? What did the AI agent touch? Those aren’t backup questions, they’re intelligence questions. The vendors who can answer them are the ones who already have a copy of the data.

What does HYCU aiR deliver?
aiR reads what your backups already know. Every backup is a copy of reality: who accessed what, where sensitive data lives, what changed, what an AI agent touched that it shouldn’t have. That intelligence has been sitting inside backup data since the first backup was ever taken. Until now nobody could read it at scale. aiR does. Sensitive data exposure, identity drift, insider risk, AI agent activity, natural language search across the entire backup estate. The line I keep coming back to is simpler than the feature list. The intelligence was already there. Now you can use it.

What makes HYCU aiR stand out?
The 100-plus SaaS applications are critical, but they are not the full answer. The answer is the economics. A DSPM tool charges you at least a quarter million dollars a year to crawl your live systems and tell you what you have. An insider risk platform takes six months to deploy. Stack the tools you need and you’re north of half a million dollars a year on visibility before a single byte is protected. Most midmarket companies make a quiet decision nobody writes down: protect what you can, accept the gaps, hope the gaps don’t become the headline. aiR breaks that math. The budget conversation isn’t “can we afford this,” it’s “we already paid for this.”

What is the competitive landscape?
There are essentially three groups. First, the data security vendors: Cyera, Securiti, BigID, and Varonis. They built deep enterprise tools priced for the Fortune 100. We win where they do not show up.

Second, the hyperscaler-native tools like Microsoft Purview. They win in M365 because they are bundled. Our wedge is everywhere else: Salesforce, Atlassian, GitHub, Box, Okta, plus the historical view that Purview cannot provide.

Third, the legacy backup vendors that have started telling an AI security story. Here is the part most people miss: an intelligence layer is only as good as the data feeding it. The legacy players protect only a fraction of what we do, and they do not protect the SaaS estate where the sensitive data and AI agent activity actually live. They could announce something tomorrow that looks like aiR, and it would still be massively limited from day one because the underlying backups do not exist.

We spent seven years building the protection footprint that makes this intelligence possible. That footprint is the moat. The intelligence is the product.

What is HYCU’s go-to-market and pricing model?
aiR ships as a capability of R-Cloud. We are not creating a separate product line. The pricing model is an attach to existing R-Cloud subscriptions with a platform uplift, structured so the customer is paying for intelligence on data we already protect, not for a second tool. Lighthouse customers first, names like AHMC Healthcare help validate the use cases and help us to scale through the partner channel into a 20 to 25 percent attach target.

Are there new partnerships and channels for HYCU?
Yes. The most important partnership story we have is Dell. We are a Dell Extended Technologies Complete (ETC) program member, and that relationship has compounded every year we’ve been in it. With the world’s most extensive set of integrations into Dell PowerProtect Data Domain joint customers, joint engineering, the booth presence at Dell Tech World, we are all in with Dell. Beyond Dell, HYCU continues to integrate and partner with cyber security firms like Halcyon, and we’re investing in the SI and managed services channel because the intelligence layer is where SI margin lives. We’re also expanding the iManage pattern, where vertical depth beats horizontal reach, into the next set of categories where the same playbook works.

Where do you think the market is heading?
Three things are true about this market over the next eighteen months. The buyer that used to buy backup is now buying resilience, and the buyer that used to buy DSPM is going to discover that their backup vendor can deliver most of what they need. Those trends collapse into one category and we are building for the collapse. Second, AI agents are about to become the largest single source of data movement inside the enterprise, and almost no one has a posture answer for what those agents are doing. The vendor that solves that wins the decade. Third, the public market is going to revalue this category, and the question for every backup company is whether they have a real second act. HYCU’s second act is aiR, and aiR is not a pivot, it’s the natural consequence of having built the right platform first.

Backups were never just insurance. They were always a memory. We’re the first company to treat them that way.