Clumio, an information backup and restoration supplier for firms utilizing the general public cloud, has raised $75 million in a Sequence D spherical of funding.
The increase comes because the Santa Clara, California-based firm claimed a four-fold improve in annual recurring income (ARR) final 12 months, pushed by new clients corresponding to Atlassian, which is now utilizing Clumio for the cloud-based incarnation of its Jira venture administration software program.
The issues that Clumio and others prefer it, corresponding to Veeam and Rubrik, try to unravel are manifold. Whereas public cloud spending is exhibiting little signal of weaning, companies additionally face rising threats associated to ransomware, with extortion gangs having fun with a bumper 2023 by most estimations. After which there’s the difficulty of knowledge heart disasters like the fireplace that hit France’s OVH in 2021, resulting in thousands and thousands of internet sites going offline and important knowledge loss.
Throw into the combination a rising array of rules with strict knowledge retention stipulations, and the necessity for larger transparency within the snowballing generative AI motion, and this all quantities to a fertile panorama for firms like Clumio to flourish, by serving to firms to automate their knowledge backup and restoration workflows.
Backed up
Based in 2017, Clumio largely serves to guard workloads on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, although it introduced support for Microsoft 365 again in 2020 too. Whereas it’s true that AWS and its ilk provide native knowledge backups spanning areas together with replication (the place objects are copied throughout buckets), versioning (the place a number of variations of an object are stored in the identical bucket) and object locking (storing objects as “write-once-read-many“) that is usually to unravel unintentional knowledge deletion and over-writes — it usually reverts to the earlier model, and restricts how firms can restore objects or a whole bucket (an information storage repository) to a selected time limit.
Furthermore, it’s vital to maintain manufacturing (i.e. “stay”) knowledge and backup knowledge in separate safe domains, one thing that many backup options (together with first-party from the cloud suppliers themselves) don’t do. So if there’s a breach, and safety credentials have been to be compromised throughout a whole group, this may successfully jeopardize the backups in addition to the manufacturing knowledge.
“Clumio overcomes this problem by delivering a default air-gapped, ‘immutable’ platform that retains enterprises’ knowledge safe from such adversarial incidents,” Clumio CEO Poojan Kumar advised TechCrunch by electronic mail.
Clumio dashboard. Picture Credit: Clumio
Certainly, Clumio shops its backup knowledge in what Kumar calls a “hyper-optimized knowledge airplane” on AWS. “Not like different distributors, we don’t deploy any heavy file programs or compute within the buyer’s account to optimize storage,” he mentioned. “We leverage our serverless knowledge processing engine in AWS to carry out all core backup operations. Having mentioned that, we do plan to broaden our knowledge airplane to different clouds this 12 months.”
On that word, many enterprises truly construct functions upon infrastructure spanning cloud suppliers — as an illustration, deploying a Microsoft SQL server database on an Amazon EC2 compute occasion. This could create a “clean house” in backup protection, the place neither cloud supplier is backing up the total stack. That is one thing that Clumio is increasingly supporting because it expands its protection throughout the cloud infrastructure and utility panorama.
Whereas Clumio has been substantively AWS-focused to this point, which is probably comprehensible for a startup trying to goal the most important piece of the cloud computing pie from the get-go, Kumar says the platform has been architected in a method that makes it straightforward to port to any cloud.
“Our mission is to be THE backup resolution for any cloud, any workload,” he mentioned. “And this 12 months, we are going to make progress on that mission. Now we have began in AWS, however will quickly broaden to the opposite key cloud suppliers as buyer demand on these clouds improve.”
Clumo CEO Poojan Kumar (heart) flanked by co-founders Kaustubh Patil (left) and Woon Ho Jung. Picture Credit: Clumio
Danger panorama
2023 was a hotbed of ransomware exercise, with prolific gangs corresponding to Russia-linked Clop exploiting software program vulnerabilities to focus on lots of of organizations, from hospitals to banks, universities and airways. However holding knowledge to ransom is only one rapid threat of not having adequate backup and restoration programs in place, with numerous guidelines and requirements corresponding to SOC2 and ISO27001 requiring enterprises to retailer and preserve knowledge for a set time frame for auditing functions.
And the OVH fireplace three years in the past additionally demonstrated the significance of a sturdy knowledge backup routine, when the French cloud supplier was successfully sued by customers who had paid for backups however misplaced their knowledge as a result of OVH had stored the backups on the identical servers because the “stay” manufacturing knowledge.
On prime of that, the fast-moving AI revolution is resulting in new rules such because the EU AI Act, which has strict provisions for traceability in order that it’s attainable to doc the origins of knowledge used to develop a given mannequin — that is vital for averting the much-maligned “black field” drawback and assist make AI extra reliable. And this might show to be a boon for Clumio and its ilk, as companies look to determine, classify and backup datasets preemptively even earlier than rules have gained a lot of a foothold.
“With the unstoppable drive of generative AI and the immovable deal with privateness, there’s monumental flux within the regulatory setting,” Kumar mentioned. “Now we have some well-known genomics clients which can be utilizing AI for drug discovery, and so they need to do it responsibly as a result of new rules would require backward traceability for years, maybe many years.”
Clumio says that it’s now “nicely into” double-digit thousands and thousands of {dollars} for ARR, a 400% improve from 2022 to 2023, although it stopped wanting giving particular numbers. Before now, the corporate had raised round $186 million, the lion’s share arriving through a $135 million Sequence C spherical greater than 4 years in the past. Whereas startups’ funding usually will increase as they transfer via their rounds, Clumio’s newest money injection sits at virtually half its 2019 increase — a transparent reflection of how the world’s financial panorama has shifted within the intervening years.
“The macro setting is kind of difficult — capital is dearer, and the mantra of ‘grow-at-all-costs’ has developed into accountable progress,” Kumar mentioned. “So, despite the fact that we quadrupled ARR and secured web new buyers in our cap desk, we determined to lift our Sequence D appropriately.”
Nonetheless, $75 million is nothing to be sniffed at, and the capital shall be crucial as Clumio seeks to bolster its market attain each by way of business protection in addition to its cloud assist.
Clumio’s Sequence D spherical was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures, Altimeter Capital and NewView Capital.
