Denmark-based cloud-native data protection and backup company Keepit A/S said today it has closed on its biggest funding round yet, raising $50 million.

The round was led by One Peak and the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark, and brings Keepit’s total venture capital raised to about $90 million. The money came via three rounds, starting with a $30 million Series A in September 2020, a $10 million Series B some time later and today’s Series C.

In addition, Keepit is believed to have raised $225 million in a debt financing round from Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023.

The money has enabled the startup to build up a dedicated, vendor-independent cloud infrastructure platform for software-as-a-service data protection, enabling enterprises to back up and protect critical information so it can be recovered safely whenever necessary. It argues that its service is easier to set up than rival data protection offerings, with customers ready to go in just five minutes.

Its platform offers dozens of features too, including instant, one-click data restoration, job monitoring, support for application programming interfaces, customized retention, access control, audit logging and data monitoring.

According to Keepit, its data protection cloud is designed to be compatible with dozens of leading enterprise SaaS applications, including Google Workspace, Zendesk, Salesforce and Microsoft offerings like 365, Entra ID, Azure DevOps, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

Steve McDowell of NAND Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Keepit plays in a very crowded market for data backups that makes it increasingly difficult to differentiate its offerings. However, it does so in a couple of ways. Unlike most other rivals, he said, it boasts its own cloud data centers, which are located in Europe, Australia and North America, where it claims to store backups for more than 5 million users worldwide.

“This gives Keepit control over their costs,” McDowell said. “So it can pass on those lower costs to its customers with its simpler, per-use pricing, regardless of data usage. That’s unique in the industry and allows enterprises to predict their expenses.”

The analyst said Keepit’s other unique capability is its blockchain infrastructure, which it uses to detect changes to customer’s data and ensure immutability. But he said it’s arguable if such an approach is better than those used by its competitors.

“It have a compelling solution for SaaS backup, but it’s operating in a tough competitive environment against an aggressive set of well-established players,” McDowell said. “The onus is on Keepit to show more differentiation.”

Keepit said the funds from today’s round will help it to do that, and it plans to use them to enhance its product and expand its data centers and go-to-market operations.

In terms of boosting its product, the money will help it to ensure broader SaaS workload coverage and build more data management tools and intelligence capabilities. The startup didn’t say so, but that last comment about “intelligence capabilities” is likely to be a reference to generative artificial intelligence features it has alluded to in the past, to aid in either administering backups or data analytics.

One Peak co-founder and Managing Partner David Klein said he’s investing in Keepit because the need for secure, independent SaaS data protection has become more critical than ever. “Keepit stands out as a leader through its innovative platform,” he insisted.

The latest round will perhaps mark out Keepit as a potential acquisition target for larger players in future. This year, we have seen a lot of consolidation in the data protection industry, with Salesforce Inc. acquiring Own Company Inc., Veeam Software Group GmbH buying Alcion Inc., and Commvault Systems Inc. snapping up Clumio Inc.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Keepit is eventually acquired, but it will likely be a while until that happens,” McDowell said. “But with $50 million in funding, it has plenty of money to make its offering a success, and it may even use some of that cash to make its own acquisition.”

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