Druva Inc., a major player in the growing cloud-based data protection market, has closed a $147 million funding round at a valuation exceeding $2 billion.

The company, which first achieved unicorn status in 2019, announced the new financing today. Canadian investment firm CDPQ led the round. It was joined by Neuberger Berman as well as existing Druva backers Viking Global Investors and Atreides Management.

Sunnyvale, California-based Druva was one of the first players in the now-crowded cloud data protection market when it joined the fray nearly a decade ago. The startup provides a software-as-a-service platform hosted on Amazon Web Services that companies can use to back up their business records. Druva’s platform can back up data from public clouds and software-as-a-service products such as Microsoft 365, as well as on-premises infrastructure and employee devices.

For information technology teams, Druva promises simplified management and reduced costs. A centralized management console built into the startup’s platform allows administrators to manage all their backups in one place. A consumption-based pricing model enables companies to only pay for what they back up, which Druva says provides higher cost efficiency than traditional data protection systems.

The cost savings Druva touts are also the result of the homegrown metadata-optimized architecture that it has implemented in its platform. The architecture, the company says, reduces some of the costs involved in holding onto backups for extended periods of time. It also makes them easier to manage in the process. 

For every backup file a company saves, there’s metadata that provides contextual information about the file, such as when it was created and what it contains. This contextual information is essential to managing the backups, which means it must be stored on relatively expensive, high-speed storage infrastructure to facilitate quick access. Further increasing costs is that, because of the technical limitations of legacy backup systems, companies often have to create multiple copies of the metadata. 

Druva’s architecture centralizes metadata in a global namespace that removes the need to create multiple copies, the company says, which brings down storage costs. Importantly, the metadata is also kept separately from the backups themselves. That allows Druva to store the two sets of information on different types of storage infrastructure to optimize operations. Metadata is kept in a high-speed Amazon DynamoDB environment that allows it to be quickly accessed by administrators, while the backups themselves are stored on cost-efficient cloud storage to reduce expenses.

The fast metadata access allows administrators to run quick searches when they need to find a backup for a business user or to recover an application after an outage. Druva also uses the metadata to power compliance features that help companies ensure their files are stored in accordance with data regulations such as GDPR.

The $147 million round Druva announced today follows a year in which, according to the startup, the amount of data it manages for clients grew by 50%. Those clients include Pfizer Inc., NASA and Marriott International Inc., among thousands of others. 

“This investment and our continued, rapid growth is further validation of our vision for a simple, open and unified data protection and management platform,” said Druva founder and Chief Executive Jaspreet Singh (pictured).

Druva will use the funding to expand its data protection platform. The investment will give the startup more resources to invest in growing its share of cloud-based data protection market, which is expanding at a brisk pace as more organizations upgrade from on-premises backup systems to SaaS products. Gartner Inc. estimates that 40% of organizations will either supplement or completely replace traditional backup applications with cloud-based solutions by 2022. 

Stephen Manley, Druva’s chief technology officer, discussed the market dynamics behind the growing adoption of cloud-based backup tools in an interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE earlier this month:

Photo: Druva