A group of investors led by Alkeon Capital and B Capital Group has bought a $240 million stake in data protection startup OwnBackup Inc. at a $3.35 billion valuation, $2 billion more than it was worth six months ago. 

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey-based OwnBackup announced the funding round this morning. The company says one of the main items on its agenda following the round is bringing its data protection technology to more cloud platforms.

A sizable portion of the world’s enterprises store the information they generate as part of their sales activities in Salesforce.com Inc.’s customer relationship management platform. This sales information comprises mission-critical records such as product orders from customers. As a result, companies often prepare backups of their Salesforce environments to avoid the risk of data getting lost from an accidental deletion or a cyberattack. 

OwnBackup provides a popular platform for backing up Salesforce environments. Using the new $240 million round, the company intends to launch support for Microsoft Corp.’s competing Dynamics 365 customer relationship management platform. The startup also revealed plans to extend its offering to “other cloud platforms” but didn’t share more specifics.

OwnBackup enables companies to automatically create daily back copies of the data they keep in Salesforce. The startup’s platform keeps backup copies in Amazon Web Services and allows for them to be retrieved within a few minutes when needed. 

Organizations using the platform can customize it based on their operational requirements. OwnBackup backs up data daily by default, but companies have the option of creating standby data copies more often if needed. Increasing the frequency of backups helps avoid a common data protection risk: Enterprises sometimes can’t recover records created in the hours immediately preceding a data loss event because their most recent available backup was made a day or several days earlier.

OwnBackup also provides features that help companies increase the speed at which they can recover from data loss events. 

Recovering information is often a challenge for enterprises even when there are backups available. That’s because administrators don’t always know exactly what data was deleted in the outage, which requires them to perform time-consuming evaluations. Moreover, once they’ve identified what files must be recovered, they have to restore them without accidentally overwriting newer data that was created by a company’s employees since the outage. 

OwnBackup’s platform includes analytics tools that automate these two tasks to a large extent, which the startup claims streamlines the disaster recovery workflow. 

OwnBackup says that more than 4,000 organizations use the platform. The startup’s plan to add support for additional cloud platforms besides Salesforce should help it expand its customer base by allowing it to target companies that aren’t Salesforce users.

Though primarily focused on data protection, OwnBackup provides tools for a number of other data management tasks too. As part of OwnBackup’s expansion plan, those tools might also be brought to the additional cloud platforms for which the startup plans to add support. 

One of the tools provided by the startup enables enterprises to create data archives for storing information they don’t actively use, but must retain to comply with regulations. OwnBackup also provides features that help firms share data with their developers to support software projects. For example, if a retailer’s developers are building an inventory tracking application, the retailer might provide them with inventory data from a few stores to help them test the application.

“This additional funding will allow us to continue to innovate and build products that help companies manage, protect and secure their SaaS data all in one place,” OwnBackup Chief Executive Officer Sam Gutmann (pictured) wrote in a blog post.

OwnBackup has raised nearly $500 million from its investors including the latest $240 million round announced today. Besides Alkeon Capital and B Capital Group, the round included the participation of BlackRock Private Equity Partners and Tiger Global. They were joined by existing OwnBackup backers Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Vertex Ventures.

That OwnBackup’s valuation jumped by $2 billion since its last funding shows its investors see big growth opportunities ahead. In this area, the startup is indirectly benefiting from the investments that Salesforce.com is making to expand its CRM business.

Last quarter, Salesforce increased revenue from its core CRM platform, Sales Cloud, by 11%, to $1.39 billion. The more organizations Salesforce signs up for Sales Cloud, the more potential customers OwnBackup can target with its CRM backup platform. 

More broadly, the software-as-a-service market as a whole is growing at a brisk pace thanks to enterprises’ continued migration of business data to the cloud. OwnBackup’s plan to add support for Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and other cloud platforms outside the Salesforce ecosystem should put it in a stronger position to capture this growth. 

Photo: OwnBackup