Data protection startup Druva's valuation crosses $1 bn, joins unicorn club

Raises $130 million investment led by Viking Global Investors, pushing total capital raised to $328 million; investment will be used to fuel growth and global expansion

Druva, a data-protection start-up that counts the US space agency NASA and drugmaker Pfizer among its customers, has raised $130 million investment led by Viking Global Investors, pushing the total capital raised to $328 million. The investment has made the Pune and California-based company a ‘unicorn,’ or a startup valued at more than $1 billion, according to the firm.

The round also included participation from new investors including certain funds advised by Neuberger Berman and Atreides Management, as well as existing investors including Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. The investment will be used to fuel growth and global expansion, and to drive new product innovations.

“Today’s funding will help Druva to power data protection for the cloud era, and accelerate our momentum to better serve the needs of enterprise customers,” said Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and chief executive of Druva.

Druva said its success has been fueled by the rapid growth of enterprise cloud adoption, a massive proliferation in data, and an evolving regulatory landscape. At the same time, the data protection industry has continued to expand significantly, with a market size expected to reach $55 billion by 2020 according to research firm IDC.  Built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Druva said it provides the software-as-a-service solution in a market dominated by legacy hardware vendors, enabling customers to eliminate complexity and drive down costs by up to 50 percent. 

Druva said its patented technology delivers all-in-one backup, disaster recovery, archival and analytics solutions that deploy in a single click and provide 360-degree visibility and control across all environments. To date, over 4,000 enterprise customers including hotel chain Marriott, National Cancer Institute and worldwide delivery service DHL have used Druva’s technology.

“The challenges of data management continue to grow as enterprise data becomes more distributed across hosted SaaS, branch offices, public clouds and endpoints; as well as the traditional datacenter,” said Steven Hill, Senior Analyst, 451 Research. “Hybrid IT is rapidly becoming the norm, and companies like Druva that focus on reducing complexity, protecting data and managing information regardless of a physical location can offer strategic advantages over those that are not as evolved,” he added.

An alumnus of IIT-Guwahati, Jaspreet Singh co-founded Druva in 2008 along with Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman, who were his colleagues at tech company Veritas. The three engineers pooled savings of about Rs 30 lakh to launch the company and rented out a room in suburban Pune in 2008. They successfully built a data security and retrieval software company. After realising the core portion of this market would remain with large firms, the company focused on protecting endpoint devices including smartphones, laptops and tablets. Druva attracted a lot of marquee investors and later shifted its headquarters to California.

“As Druva’s first investor, Sequoia India saw great potential in Jaspreet (Singh) and the transformative nature of the product the Druva team was building,” said Shailendra Singh, managing director, Sequoia Capital (India) Singapore. “Druva’s product capabilities and market adoption have continued to surprise us ever since,” he said.