Clumio, the latest startup venture of Poojan Kumar (the mind behind Exadata and Pernix Data), is announcing today two important developments for the future of the company.
New funding round
On 19-Nov-19, Clumio announced they secured 135M USD funding in series C. This follows their launch from stealth in August, where the company said it had already secured 51M USD in funding.
This funding will hopefully help Clumio further boost the development of their SaaS backup platform. In TECHunplugged’s view, this should be done by extending support to other services (Azure, GCP), but also to support additional workload types and evolve from SaaS backup into a more comprehensive data protection / data management platform.
When we spoke with Poojan in our TECHunplugged Podcast episode related to Clumio, Poojan indicated that Clumio’s goal is to develop a platform, so we hope that the funding round will bring the vision into reality.
The full Series C funding announcement is available here.
Native AWS Support
The next big announcement for Clumio is the introduction of native AWS backup support, including EBS (Amazon Elastic Block Store). This will allow Clumio to backup Amazon EC2 instances with attached EBS storage.
Beyond that, this will also allow Clumio to back up VMware Cloud on AWS workloads, providing end-to-end support to their customer base which has elected to implement a hybrid cloud strategy leveraging VMware products on-premises and in the cloud.
Clumio states that data will be encrypted in flight and at rest; the data will be residing in an immutable format outside of the customer’s AWS estate. Customers can expect Clumio to deliver global search and quick restores (file, volume & app level) while operating at scale.
The full AWS announcement is available here.
TECHunplugged’s Opinion
The investment round is needed for Clumio to continue growing its product / platform capabilities, especially since the company needs to catch up with some of its competitors which have been around for a longer time and understandably more features.
In this light, the funding round is at the very least a solid indicator of venture capital trust in Clumio – and Poojan’s ability to bring around him a team of data protection experts in building a scalable and capable data protection platform.
Related to this, we noted that Chad Kenney joined Clumio as VP & Chief Technologist, almost immediately after Pure Storage Accelerate 2019 in Austin. Chad previously held the role of VP Products & Solutions at Pure Storage.
The AWS announcement also comes at the right time. It’s desirable for Clumio customers to have the ability to backup their environment regardless of the location of the workloads (on-premises or in the cloud), although Clumio may need to consider expanding to newer markets / regions.
As usual, TECHunplugged will be following the developments with Clumio and the Data Protection market.