Cambridge-based startup Backupify today announced that it has raised $9 million in a Series C funding round led by existing investors Avalon Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and Lowercase Capital, and including software security provider firm Symantec. The round will help Backupify to hire on new staff, specifically in the sales and marketing department, in the short term, and contribute to the company’s longer-term goals of building out additional cloud platform integrations and data migration tools.
Backupify has identified the next wave of backup needs for enterprise users, now that cloud-based storage, content management and creation apps have taken hold. Things like Google Apps and Dropbox may be relatively secure, with a significant amount of redundancy built in to make sure that data remains intact even in the event of unforeseen outages and server failures, but that’s still not a 100 percent guarantee. And even when everything goes right on the technical side, human error can still cause a lot of problems.
“It’s always a good thing for a business to have a secure second copy of their data somewhere else,” Backupify CEO and co-founder Rob May explained in an interview. “If this is a critical business asset, you should insure it like anything else, and while the cloud providers are great and have good disaster recovery measures, they can’t protect you from your own disasters, things like rogue employees, accidental deletions, etc. The problem with the cloud is that it makes collaboration so easy that now anybody can screw up your stuff.”
Unlike with locally stored and managed data, keeping track of file ownership and chain of command with a lot of cloud services can be very difficult, especially when tools like Dropbox get brought into the enterprise by users who’ve adopted them as consumer tools. That makes it doubly crucial to have a way to peel back to an earlier version or restore data that’s been erased accidentally or without proper authorization.
On the services integration side, Backupify has seen a lot of requests from its users for things like Evernote and Box, as well as major enterprise SaaS software like Salesforce, which the company has been beta testing and will roll out publicly soon, according to May. Part of the funding will help fuel the addition of new integrations, as well as the development of additional migration tools like Backupify’s host Google Apps transfer service, which lets companies move their data from one domain’s Google Apps installation to a new one, useful if they’ve been acquired or are changing their company name, for example.
Backupify has some competition out there in the form of services like Silentale, which provides a history of information from social media assets, and there are plenty of comparable services aimed at consumers. Backupify shifted focus to concentrate on the enterprise market nearly two years ago, however, and this new funding should help it continue to be a standout product in that market.
