OwnBackup lands $15.5M to fund further SaaS backup
OwnBackup closed its largest funding round to date and will use it to propel product work and double employee headcount, the cloud-to-cloud backup and restore vendor said today.
The $15.5 million round of financing brings OwnBackup’s funding total up to $26 million. New investor Vertex Ventures and existing investor Insight Venture Partners led the funding round. Existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Oryzn Capital and Salesforce Ventures also participated.
OwnBackup provides backup for software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack, where data is created in the cloud. The startup has focused on its Salesforce backup, reporting that it backs up 3 trillion records, which translates to about 8 PB of data.
“OwnBackup is an independent application,” said Bridget Piraino, executive vice president of marketing. “In the case of a rare outage of your SaaS vendor, you can always access the OwnBackup application and your data.”
SaaS platforms do not necessarily provide the comprehensive backup and recovery that many organizations need, for example in the case of user error.
“Data protection, especially with regulations such as GDPR, has really come to the forefront,” Piraino said.
Moving Own up
OwnBackup opened a London sales office to go with its research and development office in Tel Aviv, Israel, and its headquarters in Fort Lee, N.J.
The company has about 60 employees and Piraino said it is on track to increase that to 120 by the end of 2018. She said the additions will come in research and development as well as sales and marketing.
The funding will help OwnBackup further deepen its investment in Salesforce protection. Since its last round of $7.5 million in July 2017, the company has added strategic partnerships with Sage and Veeva, and plans to add more.
OwnBackup’s technology is built on the Salesforce Platform. “We have a real commitment to working in their ecosystem,” Piraino said.
Other vendors that provide Salesforce protection include Datto Backupify, Spanning, Asigra and Druva. Insight Venture Partners, which has a significant backup portfolio, acquired Spanning from Dell EMC in April 2017.
OwnBackup, founded in 2015, secured its first funding round in 2016. OwnBackup CEO Sam Gutmann said last year that the company’s support will likely extend into Microsoft services. He did not provide specifics, but Office 365 is a popular SaaS application that other cloud-to-cloud backup vendors protect.
No data babysitting required
OwnBackup has about 600 customers, most of them using the Salesforce protection. It serves mainly mid-sized companies and large enterprises.
Renovo Financial, a private lender for real estate investors, has used OwnBackup for Salesforce daily data backups for about one year. Salesforce contains all of the company’s lending information, including loan level data and borrower data, said Josh Perrye, a finance associate at Renovo, which is based in Chicago.
“Without any work or checking in, I know that all data is backed up at 3 a.m. every night,” Perrye wrote in an email. “We get an alert if anything needs attention, but it rarely does. Not having to babysit our data gives me the freedom to work on other high value tasks.”
Perrye said the “compare” tools for finding lost data are intuitive and easy to understand.
“Trying to figure out what went wrong in the past was near impossible,” Perrye wrote. “Now, we can essentially run the exact same report at two points in time and hold them side by side to see what changed, when it changed and, if needed, restore to the previous version in just minutes.”