Druva raises $51mn in funding round led by Sequoia India, to continue its aggressive growth strategy

Druva, the cloud data protection and information management company, today announced raising $51 million in funding, making the total capital raised by the company $118 million. The fresh round will further drive the company’s global objective of transforming the way enterprises protect and manage information, and will allow them to continue their aggressive growth strategy.

The round was led by existing investor Sequoia India and joined by new investors – Singapore-based EDBI, as well as Blue Cloud Ventures and Hercules Capital. It also includes contributions from other existing investors, including NTT Finance, Nexus Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital. The capital will be used to accelerate both product innovation and adoption, all while enhancing product capabilities across Druva’s secure cloud platform. In addition, the capital will be used to further drive sales and marketing, and continue the company’s global expansion.

Druva’s solutions intelligently collect data, and unify backup, disaster recovery, archival and governance capabilities onto a single, optimised data set. Druva claims to have a clientele of over 4,000 global organisations, protecting over 25 PB of data. The company had reported 3,000 clients in 2014. Druva competes with the global majors in the antivirus space, including Norton, Symantec and Avast. Earlier this year, one of the players in this space, Quickheal, went for a Rs 250 crore IPO.

Jaspreet Singh, Druva founder and CEO, said,

The fragmentation of data, combined with increasing regulatory needs, is making enterprises everywhere rethink how information is best managed. In today's age, simple is genius, and Druva's 82 NPS speaks to how our cloud-first approach is simple yet disruptive.

He believes that Druva’s ability to evolve and innovate along with the new capital enables the company to continue to serve customers through notable innovations, partnerships and additional global expansion.

Druva’s cloud-first architecture offers a unified approach to data protection. Unlike the traditional approach of managing data silos like backup, DR and eDiscovery, with Druva, information is backed up once, and the platform enables advanced management and discovery analytics capabilities. This increases the availability and visibility of business critical information, while reducing the risk, cost and complexity of managing and protecting it. The platform is built natively on public cloud platforms like AWS and Azure, and claims to deliver scale and cost advantages, all while reducing the data risks inherent in today’s fragmented data environment.

It has been six years since Sequoia India's first Series A investment. Shailendra Singh, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital India Advisors said,

The team's (Druva's) ability to deliver multiple best-in-class solutions on common scalable architecture makes us very excited about what the future holds.

Swee-Yeok CHU, Chief Executive Officer and President at EDBI, believes that the risk of business data loss increases as workforce mobility becomes ubiquitous. Druva’s superior solution to safeguard critical data through their unified cloud-native platform mitigates such risks whilst enhancing IT productivity and cost savings. EDBI looks forward to supporting Druva as it expands into new markets in the region through Singapore.

This new funding round comes as Druva experiences strong growth and demand for its cloud-based data protection and information management solution. Over the last two years, Druva increased its global presence, growing to over 400 employees and expanding its direct presence, launching subsidiaries in both Japan and Germany, while simultaneously growing its enterprise customer base by more than 1,000. New customers gained during the period included NASA, Chipotle, LiveNation, Hulu, Marriott, Leidos, NBC Universal, ServiceNow and Stanford University.

Overall, one can say that Druva seems to be crossing the chasm now.