Hybrid Cloud Up Time (HYCU), a self-described “backup-as-a-service” firm for patrons managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments, as we speak introduced that it raised $53 million in a “majority fairness” Collection B spherical led by Acrew Capital with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, and Cisco Investments. In an electronic mail interview with TechCrunch, CEO Simon Taylor stated that the proceeds might be put towards increasing HYCU’s 300-person crew with a selected deal with buyer success and partnerships in addition to funding the event of latest services, together with a software-as-a-service product.
HYCU was spun out of Comtrade Software program, an IT options firm primarily based in Belgrade, Serbia, with workplaces in Dublin, Amsterdam, and Ljubljana. Comtrade — having bought the mental property of knowledge monitoring software program it created for Citrix and Microsoft — realized it might develop and promote knowledge safety merchandise via its personal channels. The corporate determined to spin out HYCU whereas retaining a majority possession and specializing in integration and outsourcing.
In 2018, Taylor was appointed CEO of HYCU (pronounced “haiku”), which is predicated in Boston — the place Comtrade Software program has a fourth outpost.
“HYCU is … centered on knowledge resiliency,” Taylor stated. “The rising menace to the explosion of knowledge is simply too essential to take dangers on. As well as, the emergence of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud the place firms are migrating extra workloads and apps from on-prem to public cloud is accelerating at an unprecedented charge. Lastly, the variety of knowledge silos inside enterprises is rising as properly. All of those are the explanation why our present and new traders are working with HYCU to deal with these challenges.”
HYCU gives software program designed to guard knowledge throughout multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. Whereas “multi-cloud” and “hybrid cloud” each confer with deployments with a couple of cloud, they differ within the sorts of infrastructure concerned. A hybrid cloud blends two or extra various kinds of clouds (e.g., an on-premises knowledge middle and public cloud like Amazon Net Companies), whereas multi-cloud combines completely different clouds of the identical kind (e.g., Amazon Net Companies and Google Cloud Platform).
Particularly, HYCU sells merchandise — most of them self-serve — for cloud migration, safety credential administration, catastrophe restoration, and backup and restoration. Taylor sees the corporate’s choices as aggressive with legacy knowledge safety suppliers with roots in mainframes, app-based knowledge safety and administration firms, and cloud-native, “backup-and-recovery-as-a-service” distributors
“HYCU skilled a lot of its progress throughout the pandemic. A lot of that was pushed by the necessity to simplify the ransomware restoration expertise,” Taylor stated. “The pandemic additionally noticed the quickest rise in using multi-cloud techniques. Many knowledge safety options have been developed earlier than public clouds existed, and folks started to appreciate the duty of defending cloud knowledge.”
There’s definitely no scarcity of competitors within the knowledge backup and restoration sector. In our protection of HYCU’s Collection A, my colleague, Ingrid Lunden, famous three main rivals: Rubrik, Veeam, Veritas, and CommVault. Veeam was acquired by Perception in 2020 for $5 billion. As of early 2019, Rubrik was valued at a whopping $3.3 billion.
In 2019, IDC estimated that the marketplace for knowledge replication and safety software program was value $9.4 billion. It’s nearly definitely grown since. Over 80% of firms responding to Flexera’s newest State of the Cloud survey reported having both a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud technique.
Gartner predicted in a 2020 report that worldwide spending on info safety and threat administration know-how and providers would attain $150.4 billion in 2021, pushed partially by high-profile ransomware assaults. On the identical time, the analytics agency projected, spending on public cloud providers would climb to $304.9 billion — up from $257.5 billion in 2020.
HYCU claims to be in a robust place for enlargement, with a buyer base totaling greater than 3,100 organizations together with U.S. state and native authorities businesses, the U.S. Division of Protection, and “a number of” branches of the U.S. army. In anticipation of courting future public sector shoppers, maybe, HYCU not too long ago introduced help for AWS GovCloud, Amazon’s cloud areas designed to host delicate knowledge and controlled workloads.
“Wherever the necessity for cost-efficient, multi-cloud knowledge safety as a service exists, we service these wants,” Taylor stated. “HYCU is positioned to proceed to thrive. We have been approached to start out a Collection B and have been in a position to do it at a time when many tech firms have been challenged to lift cash. Defending knowledge is a necessity that can all the time be current, particularly as extra knowledge is created.”
Up to now, HYCU has raised $140 million.
