Clumio raises $51 million for cloud-hosted data backup and recovery tools

Data loss can ruin businesses that aren’t prepared for the worst. Unfortunately, few are. An estimated 96% of workstations aren’t being backed up, according to a survey conducted by Contingency Planning and Strategic Research Corporation, and upwards of 93% of companies who lost servers for 10 days or more during a disaster filed for bankruptcy within the next 12 months. In fact, of companies that suffer catastrophic data loss, 43% never reopen and 51% close within two years.

That’s why serial entrepreneur Poojan Kumar founded Clumio, a software startup based in Santa Clara, California that’s developing an extensive suite of cloud-based backup solutions. It today launched out of stealth with $51 million in funding over two rounds: a series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures and a series B led by Index Ventures with participation from Sutter Hill.

“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 Kumar, who cofounded the company with VMware and Nutanix veterans Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil in 2017. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud and all-in on AWS. We have leveraged 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.”

Clumio is Kumar’s second startup after PernixData, whose flagship product intelligently virtualized server-side flash memory and RAM. After raising $62 million in funding since its founding in 2012, it was acquired by cloud computing software company Nutanix in 2016 for an undisclosed sum.

As for Clumio’s eponymous software-as-a-service product, which it’s been building on Amazon Web Services for the past two years, it taps the cloud to help enterprise customers securely manage backup and recovery from remote sites or datacenters. Clumio protects workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services by automatically replicating data in less than 15 minutes after setup, and it automatically scales up resources to meet demand while ensuring backups are encrypted in-transit and at rest. Admins can create compliance policies that apply to virtual machines (VMs) both on-premises and in the cloud, and they pay for service based only on the number of VMs protected.

“In our business, IT is a differentiator so we look to SaaS offerings for reliability, scalability, and simplicity,” said Marcus Johnston, chief security officer of Infogix, a Clumio customer. “The Clumio backup as a service offering, built exclusively on AWS, 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.”

Clumio occupies a data backup and recovery market anticipated to be worth $11.59 billion by 2022, according to Markets and Markets. It competes to a degree with San Francisco-based Rubrik, which has raised $553 million in venture capital to date for its live data access and recovery offerings, and Cohesity, which bills itself as the industry’s first hyperconverged secondary storage for backup, development, file services, and analytics. That’s not to mention data recovery juggernaut Veeam, which now serves 80% of the Fortune 500 and 58% of the Global 5000.

But John Thompson, chairman of the board at Microsoft, and Mark Leslie, managing general partner at Leslie Ventures, are convinced Clumio has what it takes to stand out in a crowded field. They’re putting their money where their mouth is: Both invested in Clumio’s latest funding round.