OwnBackup funding drives further cloud protection
Cloud-to-cloud backup startup OwnBackup plans to significantly expand following a $7.5 million Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners.
OwnBackup CEO Sam Gutmann said the company may double its workforce with the new funding. He said the funding “comes on the heels of phenomenal growth last year.”
OwnBackup reported 330% year-over-year revenue growth in 2016. The company offers backup for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, including Salesforce.
OwnBackup has approximately 30 employees, and Gutmann said his goal is to hit 50 to 60 employees within the next 12 months, with most of the additions in sales and marketing. He said he also expects significant hires in research and development.
OwnBackup’s sales and marketing team is based in New Jersey, while its research and development is in Israel.
Previous investors Innovation Endeavors, Oryzn Capital and Salesforce Ventures also participated in the funding round. OwnBackup now has $11 million in total funding, which includes its first round in January 2016, Gutmann said.
The support from Insight Venture Partners marks the first funding for OwnBackup from the New York venture capital firm. Nicolas Wittenborn, vice president at Insight Venture Partners, will join the OwnBackup Board of Directors.
Insight Venture Partners already has a significant backup portfolio and acquired OwnBackup competitor Spanning Cloud Apps from Dell EMC in April. Insight Venture invests in backup vendors Veeam Software, Unitrends, Acronis and Quest Software, as well as storage management company DataCore Software and storage systems vendor Tintri, which recently became a public company.
Aided by the additional funding, OwnBackup seeks to “continue our pace of 300 percent annual growth, which is very aggressive,” Gutmann said. The company claims 400 customers.
SaaS projects a company focus
OwnBackup has recently been focusing on its Salesforce backup. The company reports that it backs up 3 trillion Salesforce records, which translates to approximately 8 PB of data. Two of those petabytes are in a server set up for HIPAA compliance, said Bridget Piraino, executive vice president of marketing at OwnBackup.
The vendor also offers backup for ServiceNow and the Slack messaging platform. It recently launched sandbox seeding for Salesforce, which populates a Salesforce sandbox with a data set through in-app object filters, data anonymization and sized-to-fit sandbox data, according to the vendor.
OwnBackup support will likely extend into Microsoft services by the end of the year, Gutmann said. He did not provide specifics, but Office 365 is a popular SaaS application that other cloud-to-cloud backup vendors protect.
“We’re pretty excited about the projects we’re working on,” Gutmann said.
Product innovation fueled by the funding also includes the simplification of test data environments for developers working with SaaS applications.
OwnBackup’s customers include the technology, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, nonprofit, higher education, healthcare and financial services industries.
Though there haven’t been widely reported cyberattacks on SaaS applications yet, OwnBackup is also closely monitoring developments with ransomware.
“Having an independent copy of your data is critical,” Gutmann said, noting that he believes the current OwnBackup line can handle the ransomware problem as it stands today.
Gutmann helped found Intronis (now part of Barracuda) in 2003 and has been in the backup field for 17 years.