Data protection firm Druva joins the unicorn club with $130M funding

Druva, the Pune and California-based data protection firm, has become the newest Unicorn in India’s technology startup space.
The company has raised $130 million from investors led by US-based Viking Global Investors, Neuberger Berman and Atreides Management. Existing investors such as Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the round, the company said. Druva has raised $328 million in total till now, it said.
Druva joins other business focused startups such as B2B marketplace Udaan and the Chennai-based software as a service (SaaS) player Freshworks, which have attained Unicorn status in the past year.
Unicorns are startups whose value is considered to be more than $1 billion.
“We are a small player in a high-growth market. Adoption of Cloud has increased in the last two years and being the only native cloud player in this space has helped us,” CEO Jaspreet Singh told ET. “The funds will be used for product innovation and to increase market share.”
Druva’s revenue is nearly $100 million, and is growing at 50% a year.
The data protection industry has continued to expand, with its market size expected to touch $55 billion by 2020, according to industry tracker IDC.
Druva offers SaaS for backup, disaster recovery, archival and analytics on the cloud. It is currently on the Amazon Web Services platform, and provides services for AWS data centres in India. It has 4,000 customers including Marriott, Pfizer and Hitachi.
“Druva’s unique approach to the large and growing data protection market is transformative to the industry and is validated by some of the world’s largest companies and the most demanding customers,” said Harish Belur, Managing Director, Riverwood Capital.
The company, which has been focusing on the enterprise segment and on smaller firms through the self-service model, will now shift focus to the mid-market segment.
“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.
The company is investing in new solutions around data intelligence using machine learning and analytics and providing more workload coverage.
“We have average revenue of about $25,000 per customer and over time, wallet sizes have been increasing. It starts with protection and then moves into risk management and compliance and then expands into intelligence solutions, which is where we are rapidly expanding,” Singh said.
Druva currently has a team of about 700 people, and will expand that to 1,000 by year-end. It also has an R&D facility in Pune, where the company was founded before it shifted base to California.
“We’re present in seven countries and we might go to Australia and the Nordics next. But, we will focus more on going deeper into the current market we are in, over going into too many geographies,” Singh said.