Druva Inc., the California-based cloud data protection and management services provider, has managed to raise a solid $147 million during its latest financial round, led by the Canada-based pension fund, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) and new investor Neuberger Berman.
Moreover, some existing investors like Atreides Management and Viking Global Investors also participated in the round.
The round valued Druva at $2Bn, according to a Mint report, which is a massive milestone for the California based startup. The company, which counts giants like the National Aeronautical and Space Administration (NASA), and drug behemoth Pfizer among its customers, has doubled in valuation since June last year, when it had raised $130Mn at a $1Bn valuation.
Druva operates a Cloud Platform which allows for central protection of data by organizations, reducing the cost and burden that goes into securing these massive networks (which is a big pain). It also accelerates cloud projects by providing them adequate protection, and improves regulatory compliance. As such, the company claims to have greatly increased its customer base, while also having seen increased adoption of many of its Cloud Solutions products, some of which went up by more than 50%.
As the pandemic took over the world, the need to go digital emerged. This sudden change in the industry entailed a massive shift to cloud technologies, a phenomena which has helped cloud companies add billions to their name. Druva is one such company, having accelerated at an unprecedented rate thanks to its cloud solutions which attracted companies that were struggling to keep business systems robust, and had to invest money to make their networks more resilient. The success in the financial round is a testimony to the same.
Jaspreet Singh, CEO and founder of Druva, expressed his views on the successful round and the new valuation, saying, “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 too 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.”
This fundraise comes on the heels of a Druva- Dell partnership which was made to accelerate cloud adoption by customers and reduce the overall costs and problems.
Singh revealed that the recent fundraiser will mainly act as primary capital for driving the company forward. The company will currently focus on growing even further, banking upon the deal with Dell, while also investing in innovation to improve market access. Moreover, Druva may also look into the prospect of entering the public market some time in the future, even though plans are not concrete for the same yet.
CDPQ, the main investor during the financial round at Druva, too, commented on the investment, though Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer Alexandre Synnett, who revealed that the current popularity of cloud solutions is because of the rapidly inflating volumes of stored data and deployment of SaaS applications, along with concerns pertaining to cyber security. He added, “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.”
