Druva gets $147M boost, brings valuation to more than $2B

Druva has closed a large private funding round to fuel further growth.

The cloud data protection startup raised $147 million in Series H funding, bringing its total investment capital to $475 million and the company's valuation to more than $2 billion.

Druva has seen rapid customer adoption over the past year, according to CEO Jaspreet Singh. The customer base grew by 26% overall, and its total data under protection rose more than 40%. Adoption of Druva's Office 365 backup product alone jumped by about 90%. Druva has about 4,000 customers, including NASA, Pfizer and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

"There's a growing market need, and this investment lets us double down and accelerate the momentum we've already seen," Singh said. With more customers using the cloud since the start of the pandemic, they are also in turn adopting Druva to protect their new cloud-based workloads and manage their hybrid environments, Singh said.

Three trends are driving Druva's growth: customers are optimizing and re-platforming for the cloud, adjusting to a more dispersed workforce and looking for ways to solve the security challenges that come with a mostly remote workforce, he added.

Jaspreet Singh

The money from this round will be used to fund innovation and bring new applications to life, launch new sales programs and expand Druva's geographical reach, Singh added.

Despite the pandemic, data protection vendors successfully secured private funding throughout 2020. Cohesity closed a $250 million Series E in April 2020, while Odaseva got $25 million in October and Trilio raised $15 million in December.

Druva's latest funding round was led by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), which means "Quebec Deposit and Investment Fund," and included a contribution from Neuberger Berman, both new investors. Returning investors Viking Global Investors and Atreides Management also participated in the funding round.

Singh declined to provide details on Druva's revenue or state of profitability but wouldn't rule out an eventual IPO. "We're considering all possibilities," he said.

Druva, as well as data protection in general, has garnered investor interest because enterprises are modernizing production, said Vinny Choinski, senior lab analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a division of TechTarget. Whenever there's a new production workload such as a SaaS application or Kubernetes running business-critical applications, data protection needs to catch up with it. Investors are catching on that data protection will always be relevant because there will always be new workloads to protect.

Anytime you modernize production, you have to modernize data protection.

"Anytime you modernize production, you have to modernize data protection," Choinski said.

Citing data from an ESG study on enterprises' IT spending intentions for 2021, Choinski said public cloud infrastructure spending has nearly doubled in the last five years, and nearly eight out of 10 remaining on-premises workloads will be candidates for moving to the cloud over the next five years.

Data protection in the cloud and for cloud-based workloads is hot, which is why Odaseva and Trilio found investor success, Choinski said. Since it started in 2008, Druva has focused on putting protection as close to the source of the data as possible -- and right now, that's the cloud.

"Druva naturally morphed into this cloud space, and now they're in a good spot," Choinski said.