Data management company Veeam Software scored a $500 million investment led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
The funding comes on the heels of Veeam competitor Rubrik closing a $261 million funding round at a 3.3 billion valuation. And it’s yet another signal that the data management sector is hot.
Veeam specializes in backup and disaster recovery, and its software runs in on-premises data centers and across multiple clouds. The company says it brings in about $1 billion in sales per year and has more than 325,000 customers, adding 50,000 new customers every year. Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 use its software, Veeam claims.
Prior to this funding round, the Baar, Switzerland-based company had raised $32 million. This included $17 million from its founders and $15 million from Insight Venture Partners, which holds a minority stake in Veeam. The company also had more than $800 million in cash before the latest funding round, “so we didn’t need the money to continue growing,” said Ratmir Timashev, co-founder and EVP of sales and marketing for Veeam. But, he added the additional $500 million “means we don’t need to go IPO and we still have currency for our R&D as well as M&A.”
In November, the company said it would invest $150 million to expand its main research and development (R&D) center in Prague, adding 500 new software developers to its 3,600-employee base worldwide.
M&A Targets
The company’s only made two acquisition since it was founded in 2006. It bought nworks, an enterprise management software firm in 2008. And in January 2018 it bought N2WS, a small Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud backup and disaster recovery company.
As Veeam continues its push into hybrid cloud, this is the type of technology that it wants to either develop in house or acquire as it looks for M&A targets, Timashev said.
“Anything that relates to data management and data protection in the cloud: replication, migration, cloud optimization, cost optimization, as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning as it relates to data management,” he said. “All are on our radar. It’s very critical for us to dominate data management in multi-cloud. This space is very hot.”
Heat Wave
Indeed, it’s a rapidly growing market as enterprises look to scale-out software-defined storage to manage the data explosion. Veeam estimates that enterprises spend about $30 billion each year on cloud data management, and Gartner forecasts that more than 80 percent of enterprise data will be stored in these types of scale-out storage systems by 2021, up from 30 percent in 2017.
For this reason, data management vendors are raking in massive amounts of funding, and traditional infrastructure vendors like Cisco and Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) are investing in and beefing up their partnerships with data management software makers.
In addition to Rubrik’s $261 Series E announced yesterday, Cohesity closed a $250 million Series D last year. Both Cisco and HPE invested in Cohesity’s round.
Also yesterday, HPE and software-defined storage startup Datera partnered to bundle Datera’s platform on HPE’s servers (HPE also has a similar partnership with Cohesity). Plus Cisco and Cloudera teamed up to combine Cloudera’s backup and disaster recovery software with Cisco’s hyperconverged infrastructure.
