Clumio today announced $51 million in funding as it introduced its software-as-a-service (SaaS) backup platform.

The public cloud-born SaaS backup provider was founded in 2017 by Poojan Kumar, co-founder and former CEO of PernixData (acquired by Nutanix in 2016), alongside Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil who previously held engineering and leadership roles at VMware and Nutanix.

Led by Sutter Hill Ventures, Clumio secured $11 million in Series A funding in October 2017, followed by an additional $40 million Series B funding in November 2018, led by Index Ventures with significant participation from Sutter Hill Ventures. 

Though it has been operating in stealth mode, Clumio’s SaaS for enterprise backup has been generally available since April 2019 with 10 active accounts including the City of Davenport in Iowa and Causeway Capital.

Kumar and the team founded Clumio to address the fundamental shift that the industry is experiencing from use cases that were servicing the on-demand sector and being delivered as SaaS. The current generation of SaaS companies are capitalizing on infrastructure as a service, building out software on the public cloud, he explained.

“That has been the founding vision for us," Kumar said. "It's about going and building a data platform on top of the public cloud and delivering fast services on top of this data platform.” 

The Clumio backup technology is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to leverage the capabilities of the cloud.  It aims to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services, regardless of where the workload resides, affording end users the ability to scale on-demand, and reduce the complexity that comes with maintaining on-premises hardware. 

“At the end of the day, everybody has data and they need protection for the data and backups of the data," Kumar said. "And we are essentially solving that.”