Chambers signs on as Rubrik investor

A year ago at VMworld, Rubrik introduced 6-foot-11 Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant as an investor and board advisor. The converged secondary storage vendor’s newest money man and advisor isn’t quite as tall, but many consider him a giant in the IT business.

Rubrik today unveiled former Cisco CEO John Chambers as an investor and board advisor. Chambers held the Cisco CEO role for 20 years until he retired in 2015. During his tenure at the company, Cisco grew from $70 million in annual revenue to $47 billion. He is now CEO of JC2 Ventures and Cisco’s Chairman Emeritus.

Rubrik is among Silicon Valley’s hot startups, growing to more than 1,200 employees and a claimed bookings run rate of close to $300 million since its 2014 inception. Rubrik has $292 million in venture funding, including an $180 million round in 2017. Other Rubrik investors include Microsoft chairman and former Symantec CEO John Thompson, former Data Domain and ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman and former Veritas CEO Mark Leslie.

In a blog post on Rubrik’s web site, Chambers lauded the company’s leadership team and investors, its “obsession” with customer satisfaction, and its partners. The leaders he highlighted include CEO and founder Bipul Sinha, and executives Jeff Vijungo, Murray Demo, Peter McGoff, Kara  Wilson and Shay Mowlem.

Partners include cloud providers Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Chambers also praised Rubrik’s Cloud Data Management platform.

“Rubrik is offering the right product, at the right time, with the right mindset,” Chambers wrote. “The entire team at JC2 Ventures is committed to the company’s continued success and I am thrilled to be on this journey with Bipul and his incredible team.”

Rubrik today also named former VMware exec Avon Puri as CIO.