Clumioa data backup and recovery provider for companies using the public cloud, has raised $75 million in a Series D funding round.
The increase comes as the Santa Clara, California-based company claimed a fourfold increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) last year, driven by new customers such as Atlassian, which now uses Clumio for its cloud-based incarnation of Jira. project management software.
The problems that Clumio and others like Veeam and Rubrik are trying to solve are multiple. While public cloud spending shows little sign of weaning off, businesses are also facing growing threats related to ransomware, with extortion gangs enjoying a surge in 2023 according to most estimates. And then there’s the issue of data center disasters like fire hit France’s OVH in 2021resulting in millions of websites going offline and significant data loss.
Throw into the mix a growing set of regulations with strict data retention terms and the need for more transparency in the snowballing AI movement, and it all adds up to a fertile landscape for companies like Clumio to thrive, helping companies automate their data flows backup and recovery operations.
Supported
Founded in 2017, Clumio is largely used to protect workloads on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure, however introduced support for Microsoft 365 in 2020 as well. While it’s true that AWS and its ilk offer native data backups that span regions including copy (where objects are copied to buckets), publications (where multiple versions of an object are kept in the same bucket) and object lock (save objects as “write-once read-many“) this is usually to resolve accidental data deletion and overwrite — it usually reverts to the previous version and limits how companies can restore objects or an entire bucket (a data storage repository) at a selected point in time.
Additionally, it’s important to keep production (ie “live”) data and backup data in separate secure sectors, which many backup solutions (including first-party ones from the cloud providers themselves) don’t do. So if there is a breach and security credentials are compromised across an entire organization, it would compromise backups as well as production data.
“Clumio overcomes this challenge by providing an air-gapped, ‘immutable’ default platform that keeps enterprise data safe from such adverse events,” Clumio CEO Poojan Kumar told TechCrunch via email.
Clumio dashboard. Image Credits: Clumio
Indeed, Clumio stores its backup data in what Kumar calls a “hyper-optimized data tier” on AWS. “Unlike other vendors, we don’t deploy heavy file systems or calculations at the customer’s expense to optimize storage,” he said. “We use our serverless data processing engine on AWS to perform all core backup functions. That said, we plan to expand our data tier to other clouds this year.”
On that note, many businesses actually build applications on infrastructure that spans cloud providers — for example, deploying a Microsoft SQL Server database on an Amazon EC2 compute instance. This can create a “gap” in backup coverage where no cloud provider is backing up the full stack. That’s something that Clumio is supports more and more as it extends its coverage across the cloud infrastructure and application landscape.
While Clumio has largely focused on AWS so far, which is perhaps understandable for a startup that wants to target the biggest slice of the cloud computing pie from the ground up, Kumar says the platform is designed in a way that makes it easy to port in any cloud.
“Our mission is to be the backup solution for any cloud, any workload,” he said. “And this year, we will make progress in this mission. We started with AWS, but will soon expand to the other major cloud providers as customer demand for these clouds grows.”
Clumo CEO Poojan Kumar (center) is flanked by co-founders Kaustubh Patil (left) and Woon Ho Jung. Image Credits: Clumio
Danger landscape
2023 was a hotbed of ransomware activity, with prolific gangs such as the Russian-linked Clop exploiting software vulnerabilities to target hundreds of organizations, from hospitals to banks, universities and airlines. But holding data to ransom is only a direct risk of not having adequate backup and recovery systems in place, with various rules and standards such as SOC2 and ISO27001 requiring businesses to store and retain data for a specified period of time for audit purposes.
And the OVH fire three years ago also demonstrated the importance of a strong data backup system when the French cloud provider was successfully sued by customers who had paid for backups but lost their data because OVH had kept the backups on the same servers as the ‘live’ production data.
In addition, the rapidly evolving AI revolution is leading to new regulations such as the EU AI Law, which has strict provisions on traceability, so that it is possible to document the origin of data used to develop a particular model — this is important in preventing the much-maligned “black box” problem and helping to make AI more reliable. And that could prove to be a boon for Clumio and its ilk as businesses try to identify, sort and back up data sets proactively, even before regulations take hold.
“With the unstoppable power of generator AI and the unwavering focus on privacy, there is tremendous flux in the regulatory environment.” Kumar said. “We have some big-name genomics customers that are using AI for drug discovery, and they want to do it responsibly because the new regulations will require traceability for years, maybe even decades.”
Clumio says it is now “well into” double-digit million dollars in ARR, a 400% increase from 2022 to 2023, though it stopped short of giving specific numbers. So far, the company has raised about $186 million, with the lion’s share coming through a $135 million Series C round more than four years ago. While startups’ funding typically increases as they progress through their cycles, Clumio’s latest cash infusion is almost half of 2019’s increase — a clear reflection of how the world’s financial landscape has changed in the intervening years.
“The macro environment is quite challenging – capital is more expensive and the mantra of ‘growth at any cost’ has evolved into responsible growth,” Kumar said. “So even though we quadrupled ARR and secured net new investors in our capital table, we decided to raise our Series D appropriately.”
However, $75 million is nothing to be sniffed at, and the capital will be needed as Clumio looks to strengthen its market reach in terms of both industry coverage and cloud support.
Clumio’s Series D round was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures, Altimeter Capital and NewView Capital.
