Bengaluru: Druva, among the world’s biggest data protection startups, has secured $80 million (about Rs 513 crore) in funding led by US-based Riverwood Capital, bulking up capital as enterprises face frequent threats from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

The company’s second fundraise in under a year takes its total capital secured to about $200 million. An investor pegged Druva’s valuation following its latest fundraise at $500-600 million. The company was estimated to be worth about $220 million when it raised money in 2014, and it didn’t disclose its worth when it secured $51 million from investors in October.

“We have a great up-round from the last time. We have almost doubled our valuation from the last round,” chief executive Jaspreet Singh said, declining to disclose the exact valuation at which the company raised money.

Existing investors Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, Tenaya Capital and others participated in Tenaya Capital and others participated in Druva’s latest fundraise, which the startup will use to accelerate research and development and expand its go-to-market efforts worldwide.

“The market which we are in is heating up quite a bit. In the last six months, close to $350 million has been raised by startups (in this market),” said Singh. “The money will help us double down.”

Given the increased threat of cyber attacks such as the ransomware WannaCry in recent months, the timing of the investment is just right for Druva. The company, which counts the US space agency NASA among clients, helps enterprises reduce the risk, cost and complexity of managing and protecting data.

“Over the last year, we saw a massive uptake on our second product line called Phoenix, which is focussed on the core data centre being backed up or managed on cloud. We also recently announced… Druva cloud platform, which you can think of as an Amazon cloud for data protection,” said Singh.

The company has experienced 300% annual growth in its server data protection business. It serves more than 4,000 customers worldwide, including Cipla, Marriott and Lockheed Martin. The total data protected by Druva exceeds 40 petabytes, the company said in a statement. A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes.

Druva was founded in 2008 by Singh, Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman, who were colleagues at Veritas Software. It has grown from being a laptop-backup services provider to a maker of data protection and information management suites for large enterprises. Druva competes globally with the US-based Cohesity and Rubrik.

“Druva’s tremendous growth can be attributed to the rise of advanced and persistent data threats such as ransomware, changing global data regulations, and the explosion of data in motion driven by enterprise digital transformation initiatives,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus Venture Partners.

Source: Times of India