As businesses continue to move more of their computing and data to the cloud, one of the startups that has made a name for itself as a provider of cloud-based solutions to protect and manage those IT assets has raised a big round of funding to build its business.<\/p>\n
Druva<\/a>, which provides software-as-a-service-based data protection, backup and management solutions, has raised $130 million in a round of funding that CEO and founder Jaspreet Singh says takes the company \u201cwell past the $1 billion mark\u201d in terms of its valuation.<\/p>\n Alongside this news, it\u2019s making an acquisition to continue building out the storage part of its business (one of several product areas that it\u2019s developing): it\u2019s acquiring CloudLanes<\/a>, a startup that was backed by Microsoft and others, for an undisclosed sum, in a deal that will likely be formally announced in early July.<\/p>\n The funding is being led by Viking Global Investors, the hedge fund and investment firm, with participation from two other new investors,\u00a0Neuberger Berman and Atreides Capital; and existing investors including Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners (who were part of Druva\u2019s <\/a> last round of $80 million in 2017<\/a>). The company, Singh said, is now nearly at a $100 million annual run rate. And although he would not disclose revenues, he said it\u2019s now in a strong position to consider going public as its next step (or finally entertaining one of the many acquisition offers Singh admitted Druva gets).<\/p>\n \u201cAs we look at growth and the potential of what we are doing, the next obvious step is to look at public markets in the next 12 to 18 months,\u201d he said in an interview.<\/p>\n The strong numbers (in terms of funding raised, valuation and performance) are a sign not just of Druva\u2019s own business health, but of the opportunity it is tackling.<\/p>\n Spurred by a number of factors \u2014 the unfortunate rise of malicious hacking and data breaches, a massive wave of computing services that are creating mountains of data that can now be parsed for insights, and a big move to cloud computing \u2014 the data protection industry is booming, with IDC predicting that it will collectively be worth\u00a0$55 billion by 2020. Druva itself works with some 4,000 organizations today, with many in the mid-market in terms of size, with customers ranging across a number of verticals and including the likes of the Build Group, the American Cancer Society and the Port of New Orleans.<\/p>\n