Clumio, a company providing data backup and recovery solutions for businesses using the public cloud, has raised a staggering $75 million in a recent Series D funding round. This news comes on the heels of the California-based company’s impressive four-fold increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the past year. Clumio’s success can be attributed to its growing list of high-profile clients, including Atlassian, who have recently adopted Clumio’s services for their cloud-based version of Jira project management software.
“The problems that Clumio, and others like it such as Veeam and Rubrik, are trying to solve are manifold,” said Clumio CEO Poojan Kumar.
The rise of public cloud usage has brought about its own set of challenges for businesses, with threats like ransomware and data center disasters looming on the horizon. Additionally, as data regulations become more stringent and the demand for transparency in generative AI grows, the need for companies like Clumio to automate data backup and recovery workflows becomes increasingly apparent.
Backed Up
Established in 2017, Clumio primarily focuses on protecting workloads on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. While AWS and other cloud providers offer native data backup options like replication, versioning, and object locking, these are typically only suitable for accidental data deletion or overwrites. Clumio sets itself apart by providing a default air-gapped, “immutable” platform that keeps enterprise data secure from potential adversarial incidents.
Unlike other backup solutions, Clumio stores its data in a “hyper-optimized data plane” on AWS without adding any heavy file systems or compute processes to the customer’s account. This unique approach allows Clumio to perform all core backup operations using a serverless data processing engine. However, the company plans to expand its data plane to other cloud providers in the coming year.
It’s worth noting that many enterprises utilize multiple cloud providers, which can create a coverage gap for backups. For example, if a company deploys a Microsoft SQL server database on an Amazon EC2 compute instance, neither cloud provider is responsible for backing up the entire stack. Clumio recognizes this challenge and is working to expand its coverage across various cloud providers and application ecosystems.
“Our mission is to be THE backup solution for any cloud, any workload,” said Kumar. “And this year, we will make progress on that mission. We have started in AWS, but will soon expand to the other key cloud providers as customer demand on those clouds increases.”
Risk Landscape
2023 saw a rise in ransomware attacks, with groups like Russia-linked Clop exploiting software vulnerabilities to target organizations across various industries. However, the risk of holding data to ransom is just one factor to consider. Regulations like SOC2 and ISO27001 require companies to store and maintain data for auditing purposes, making a robust backup and recovery system critical. Additionally, the OVH fire in 2021 illustrated the importance of having a solid data backup strategy when the French cloud provider faced legal action from customers who lost their data due to relying on the provider’s backup services.
The ever-evolving world of AI also brings its own complexities, with regulations such as the EU AI Act requiring traceability to document the origins of data used for developing AI models. This provides an opportunity for Clumio and similar companies to assist businesses in identifying, classifying, and backing up datasets preemptively, even before regulations fully take effect.
“With the unstoppable force of generative AI and the immovable focus on privacy, there is enormous flux in the regulatory environment,” Kumar explained. “We have some famous genomics customers that are using AI for drug discovery, and they want to do it responsibly because new regulations will require backward traceability for years, perhaps decades.”
Clumio boasts a significant increase in ARR, with a reported 400% growth from 2022 to 2023. However, the company declined to share specific numbers. So far, Clumio has raised around $186 million in funding, with the majority coming from a $135 million Series C round four years ago. Although companies typically raise more money as they progress through funding rounds, Clumio’s latest injection is only about half of its previous round in 2019. This discrepancy reflects the changing economic climate in recent years.
“The macro environment is quite challenging – capital is more expensive, and the mantra of ‘grow-at-all-costs’ has evolved into responsible growth,” Kumar acknowledged. “So, even though we quadrupled ARR and secured net new investors in our cap table, we decided to raise our Series D appropriately.”
Still, $75 million is a significant amount of money, and it will undoubtedly help Clumio continue to expand its market reach, both in terms of industry coverage and cloud support. The Series D funding was led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from Index Ventures, Altimeter Capital, and NewView Capital.
