Clumio Announces $51M in Funding and Unveils Authentic SaaS for Enterprise Backup

Clumio founders Poojan Kumar, Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil

Clumio announced $51M in funding from leading Silicon Valley investors and officially launched its flagship backup as a service product.

Clumio, innovator of authentic SaaS for enterprise backup, today announced $51M in funding from leading Silicon Valley investors and officially launched its flagship backup as a service product. With this new service, enterprises can eliminate hardware and software for on-premise backup and avoid the complexity and cost of running 3rd party backup software in the cloud. By taking full advantage of cloud scale, economics, and elasticity, there is now a secure and efficient way to protect on-premise, VMware Cloud for AWS, and native AWS service workloads. 

Clumio was founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Poojan Kumar, co-founder and former CEO of PernixData (acquired by Nutanix [Nasdaq:NTNX]), alongside Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil who bring strong engineering and leadership backgrounds from VMware and Nutanix. The company announced $51 million in funding received over two rounds: A 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. 

Clumio is a secure, backup as a service that consolidates the protection of an enterprise data center and any remote sites with no hardware or software to size, configure, manage - or even buy at all. As enterprises move aggressively to cloud, they can use Clumio to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services. Authentic SaaS protects data regardless of where it resides and delivers these benefits to the enterprise:

  • Easy to Manage - setup and start protecting your data in less than 15 minutes
  • Predictable Costs - pay for the service based on the number of VMs protected
  • Scale On-Demand - resources automatically adapt to meet requirements
  • Global Compliance - create one policy to apply to VMs on-premise and in the cloud
  • Always-On Security - all backups are encrypted in-transit, and at rest

“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.

Clumio backup as a service has been generally available since April 30th, 2019. Visit www.clumio.com or see us at VMworld Booth #233 to learn more.

About Clumio

Clumio is the innovator of authentic SaaS for enterprise backup. Using this 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. Born in the public cloud, Clumio can leverage the most modern cloud services to ensure it meets the current and future backup requirements of the most demanding enterprises. For more information, visit: www.clumio.com

1 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US45213719 IDC, Worldwide Software as a Service and Cloud Software Forecast,  2019 - Market Forecast - Doc # US45213719  2019–2023

2 IDC, Worldwide Data Protection as a Service Forecast, 2018–2022: Initial Market Sizing, #US44108018, July 2018.

In this post: Mike Volpi

Published — Aug. 14, 2019