Clumio launches enterprise Backup as a Service product with $51 million in funding

Clumio, a tech startup building a public cloud SaaS data and the innovator of authentic SaaS for enterprise backup, has officially launched its flagship Backup as a Service product with $51 million in funding from leading Silicon Valley investors. Clumio Backup as a Service first became available on April 30th, 2019.

Clumio has received a total of $51 million in funding over two rounds. Sutter Hill Ventures-led Series A round and a Series B round driven by Index Ventures with significant participation from Sutter Hill Ventures. Several individuals experienced at investing in disruptive technologies also participated including, Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Technologies, and John Thompson, chairman of the board at Microsoft.

Founded just two years ago by a team with extensive experience in storage technology: Poojan Kumar, co-founder and former CEO of PernixData (acquired by Nutanix), alongside Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil (from VMware and Nutanix), Clumio was born in the public cloud. It is capable of leveraging the most modern cloud services to ensure it meets the current and future backup requirements of the most demanding enterprises. Using Clumio’s secure service, organizations eliminate hardware and software for on-premise backup and avoid the complexity and cost of running 3rd party backup software in the cloud. As enterprises move aggressively to cloud, they use Clumio to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services.

“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 Poojan Kumar, Clumio co-founder and CEO. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. We have and can leverage 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.”

“In our business, IT is a differentiator so we look to SaaS offerings for reliability, scalability, and simplicity,’” said Marcus Johnston, Chief Security Officer at Infogix, Inc. “The Clumio backup as a service offering 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,” added Johnston.

IDC estimates the global market for SaaS applications revenues is expected to increase from approximately $100 billion in 2018 to more than $185 billion by 20221. Clumio is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this trend, giving enterprises a fast and effective way to make progress against organizational mandates to move workloads to the cloud or minimize the amount of time they spend on applications and operations that are not core to their businesses. According to IDC, the Data Protection as a Service market – which includes spend on backup, and disaster recovery cloud services – will grow to over $10 billion by 20222. Enterprises have already moved CRM, IT service management, HR and data warehouse workloads to the cloud. Clumio’s mission is to do the same for this large market.

“No longer do organizations need to purchase single-purpose hardware and software for backup and recovery requirements,” said Andrew Smith, research manager, IDC Infrastructure Platforms and Technologies Group. “In many cases, they can quickly and cost-efficiently rely on cloud services. As a result of this consumption change, we have witnessed a dramatic shift in thinking in terms of the best way for IT and line of business buyers to leverage cloud services for workloads like backup and disaster recovery. As a result of this shift, we forecast that the backup as a services market will experience a double-digit compound annual growth rate over the next 5 years – far outpacing the growth of the traditional data replication and protection software segment.”

Like other companies that have successfully moved enterprise workloads such as CRM, HR, IT service management, and data warehouses to a software as a service model, Clumio is born in the cloud. With hardware and software logistics, implementation, and costs out of the way, Clumio channel partners and solutions providers can focus more directly on solving the problems of their enterprise customers, quickly transitioning their own business models to take advantage of the cloud opportunity in the process.

“As enterprise companies have increasingly turned to public cloud to solve business problems and deliver business value, it also becomes necessary for them to rethink data protection. Clumio delivers solutions that address backup and recovery on-prem and in the public cloud without planning, sizing and implementation complexities,” noted Mike Thompson, CEO of Groupware Technology.