Securing cloud services remains a challenge for businesses. This is why several companies are working on security solutions that specifically address this need.
In the last example of this, Odaseva has raised $54 million in funding. This startup focuses on a unique use case: securing Salesforce environments. Silver Lake Waterman is leading this round, with previous backers F-Prime, Eight Roads and Serena Capital also participating. New promoters Eurazeo and Crescent Cove complete the round.
Odaseva has now raised $90 million to date. It did not disclose its valuation, but founder and CEO Sovan Bin said the pre-money valuation was under $100 million. PitchBook it is definitely wrong. Considering this C Series comes on the back of strong momentum for the company — which surpassed 100 million users November 2022 and counts hotel giants Accor, Schneider Electric and Michelin as clients — the valuation is likely to be much higher.
Odaseva has an interesting story that led to the creation of the startup.
Sovan Bin worked at Salesforce more than a dozen years ago, at a time when the CRM giant was already big but not as big as it is today. He was based in Paris and tasked with helping some of Salesforce’s biggest customers, such as Schneider Electric (which at the time was Salesforce’s biggest customer worldwide), figure out how to use Salesforce and be as secure as what it was replacing. , which was a collection of on-premises solutions.
Bin said they discovered that Schneider and the others were using a collection of different solutions to secure their environments — point solutions, but more around points of vulnerability than points of specific application use.
“What they wanted was to cover all the security requirements for the single platform without having to shop around from cyber to data protection to failover management,” he said. “But in the cloud, especially, it seems like most vendors aren’t qualified to focus on large enterprises in that way.”
His approach, based on his deep understanding specifically of Salesforce, was to create a solution that could work with it and its specifics and use cases.
It worked and he saw that there could be more business in selling this solution to others. So Odaseva was born, first in Paris, and later moved to San Francisco to be closer to customers in the U.S. Its products today include data protection (including backup and restore services). zero trust data security. data archiving; data compliance (which has certainly increased with regulation); and data platform services (which includes sandboxing, automation and more).
Bin is French-Cambodian and the Odaseva company name combines words from both languages, with a very lateral twist on the company’s mission statement. “Oda is based on the word for ‘courage’ in French, and ‘seva’ comes from a very old word in Cambodia, from Sanskrit, which means, I help the community in a very selfless way, trying to help the elders. In a nutshell, it refers to trying to be innovative when thinking about customer success.”
As Salesforce has grown in revenue and reach as a business over the past 12 years — it did more than $9 billion in revenue last quarter, and since 2012, its full-year revenue has grown more than 13 times as it offers a number of different services for users — so does Odaseva. But so do others after spotting the opportunity here.
The multitude of companies that provide security solutions specifically for Salesforce users and the Salesforce environment include; AppOmni, WithSecure, Opswat, Baron and even Salesforce itself. This competitive landscape, however, doesn’t seem to bother the startup. Bin tells me that the addressable market is large enough that, even if Odaseva could one day consider addressing other SaaS applications, there are currently no plans to do so.
Another thing to note here: Odaseva’s funding is also important because of the broader market context. The pendulum in business IT in recent years has swung towards platforms and away from point solutions. The narrative has gone something like this: budgets are tight, so buyers are looking for all-in-one solutions that are much easier (and therefore less expensive) to procure and ultimately operate, and so there is a consolidation going on as more solutions (which serve narrower use cases) are united under larger umbrellas.
Odaseva’s focus, and success in her pursuit, suggests there’s still plenty of opportunity for players who don’t subscribe to that narrative.
“The Odaseva team has built a leading data resilience platform for the Salesforce ecosystem that provides security and continuity solutions for critical applications,” said Shawn O’Neill, managing director and group head of Silver Lake Waterman, in a statement. “Sovan and Odaseva’s leadership team have a solid track record of building value and trust with global enterprise customers, and we are excited to partner with the team and contribute to further growth.”
