Cloud data protection and management services provider Druva Inc. has raised $147 million in its latest round of fundraising from Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and Neuberger Berman, valuing the company at over $2 billion, said a senior executive of the company in interaction with Mint.
The round also included participation from existing investors Viking Global Investors and Atreides Management.
Druva’s Cloud Platform enables organizations to centrally protect data, irrespective of where the data is located, which helps organizations to reduce the cost and complexity of data protection, accelerate and protect cloud projects and increase cyber resilience and regulatory compliance.
Druva’s fundraising comes on the back of covid-19 led disruptions over the last 12 months, which led to enterprises moving swiftly to adopt cloud solutions to strengthen business resilience, maintain critical business operations and support hybrid work models.
“Because of the covid disruptions, we saw many businesses shift to cloud to avoid paying fixed cost of infrastructure when the businesses are going up and down. We saw a demand for cyber resiliency in workforce productivity areas with the workforce getting more and more digitized. And then a lot of services underwent digitalization due to the environment.
And with these three major trends, we have seen that the nature of data protection to has changed. If the workforce is going to be dominantly remote, then you need better security, better data management across all these remote workforce and use cases and if you have to launch a next generation of internet-oriented services, you have to think about data protection architecture or infrastructure to be deployed in the cloud,” said Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva.
Druva Cloud Platform’s customer base has expanded substantially during 2020, while the adoption of multiple Druva Cloud Platform products has increased by 50% in the same time period, the company claims. In the last year, the company’s data under management has grown by more than 40% percent.
The latest fundraise is largely in the nature of primary capital to support the company’s growth going forward, said Singh.
“It’s mostly for growth. I think we were fortunate to see great growth trends in all areas. And we’ve been investing heavily in terms of entering new countries and geography. So this helps us get better ammunition to lead those efforts and to also invest in the Dell partnership,” said Singh
Earlier this month Druva entered into a collaboration with Dell Technologies to help customers with cloud adoption and reduce overall data protection costs and complexity.
With strong growth tailwinds and the latest round of capital infusion, Druva could look at going public, although there are no firm plans as of now.
“We continue to have a strong focus on growth for the next year. We announced a partnership with Dell two weeks ago, which will be a cornerstone of our growth in coming years as well, and we will invest in innovation and in market reach and access. Definitely IPO is an option as we look forward, something we’re interested in and constantly paying attention to and definitely an opportunity to look forward to,” said Singh.
Rising volumes of stored data, rapid adoption of cloud and deployment of SaaS applications, regulatory frameworks and cybersecurity concerns have accelerated the demand for data protection and management solutions for businesses, said Alexandre Synnett, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at CDPQ. “The working-from-home dynamic experienced globally has further accentuated the need for cloud-based data protection solutions and we believe Druva is in an excellent position to seize opportunities and enhance its clients’ agility and data compliance.”
