Veeam Software Inc., a major provider of data protection and management tools, today announced that it has landed a $500 million funding round led by Insight Venture Partners.

The massive round comes just a day after competing data management startup Rubrik Inc. reeled in a $261 million investment of its own, valuing it at $3.3 billion. Veeam’s post-money valuation, which it didn’t disclose, is likely significantly higher. 

The Switzerland-based company claims to be generating about $1 billion in annual revenue from 325,000 customers worldwide. This installed base includes 82 percent of the Fortune 500 and is continuing to expand rapidly, with Veeam currently adding new users at a rate of 50,000 per year. The company recently marked its 41st quarter of consecutive double-digit sales growth.

Veeam’s core competency is data protection. The company’s flagship products, Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Availability Suite, enable organizations to create quickly retrievable copies of the records in their different technology environments.

The products work with everything from on-premises servers running VMware Inc.’s virtualization software to cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s. Rubrik, whose core focus is also data protection, offers a similar value proposition. The startup positions its platform as a unified solution for protecting workloads across in-house and cloud-based environments.

Another point of similarity is that both companies have extended their focus beyond data protection to adjacent market segments. Rubrik last year launched a platform called Polaris for centrally monitoring how records are stored across environments, while Veeam offers its own lineup of value-added management tools. The newest of the bunch is a product called DataLabs that lets administrators use backup copies of records to test application changes before releasing them to production.

The additional $500 million on its books will put Veeam in a stronger position to address the rising competition. The company said it plans to double down on product development to expand its feature set, as well as invest in acquisitions.

As part of the effort, Veeam plans to partner with Insight Onsite, the business development and consulting arm of investor Insight Venture Partners. The venture capital firm bought a minority stake in the company back in 2013 for an undisclosed sum. It was joined Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in this latest round.

Ratmir Timashev, Veeam’s co-founder and executive vice president for worldwide sales and marketing, spoke with SiliconANGLE’s video studio theCUBE at last year’s VeeamON conference in Chicago about how the company aims to dominate multicloud data management:

Photo: Veeam