Kasten, a Los Altos, California-based cloud-native data management startup, raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners. This brings its total raised to $17 million.

“This funding underscores not only the growing opportunity in providing critical day two services such as backup, disaster recovery, and application mobility for cloud-native applications, but also Kasten's unique approach and market leadership,” said Gaurav Rishi, Kasten’s head of product, in an emailed response to questions. 

According to Rishi, the capital will go toward product development and acceleration to introduce new features that will support complex workflows. The startup also plans to open a new office in Salt Lake City.

Kasten entered the data management ecosystem in January 2017, backed by Silicon Valley angel investors and executives from Google, Amazon, and Facebook, with its flagship cloud-native data management product, K10. The product enables enterprises to run stateful applications on Kubernetes. 

K10 offers an application-centric view of data management that “treats the application as the unit of atomicity,” and “maintains the simplicity and portability that IT and operations team need while operating in this complex environment,” Rishi explained. 

It balances the needs of operators that control data protection and mobility of the entire application stack with those of developers that focus on core application logic, he said. 

Kasten noted that K10 features policy-driven backup, recovery, and migration automation for Kubernetes applications that allows operators to establish rules for policies and data workflows that need to be protected, and it automatically identifies workflows that share the same characteristics, which eliminates the need for manual data management. 

In the event of an accidental (or malicious) data deletion or overwriting, K10 can restore an app to its last known good state and repair misconfigurations by restoring artifacts and configurations — even in the event of a security breach or unauthorized manipulations.

Kasten faces a competitive data management landscape, but says its cloud-native roots give it an edge.

“While enterprise data management related use cases are an established need with vendors like Veeam, Rubrik, Veritas, Commvault, Dell EMC — the solutions are restricted to traditional workloads including non-cloud-native applications,” Rishi said. “As Kubernetes-based, cloud-native applications become more ubiquitous, Kasten with its K10 product offering is in a unique position to provide critical data management services for these modern cloud-native applications.”