Druva, Inc., a startup that promises to provide large organizations with the benefits of public cloud storage without the compromises of consumer-oriented file lockers, has received another $25 million in financing from its big-name investors to hammer home the message of painless, off-premise data management. The round, which is its fourth, was led by Silicon Valley stalwart Sequoia Capital and includes Nexus Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital.
Established in 2008 by three former employees of enterprise backup specalist Veritas Software Corp., now a part of Symantec Corp, Druva offers a cloud-based service called inSync for protecting corporate data across laptops, smartphones and tablets. The platform is touted as a central end-point governance hub that goes beyond the basic device sync and disaster recovery functionality that is available in other products to include extensive monitoring capabilities which make it possible to maintain continuous records of user activity, according to the company.
That data is useful both for auditing purposes and for operational activities such as policy enforcement, a task that can be carried out directly from within the inSync interface using the built-in configuration options. Admins are able to define how much and what information a given employee can access, determine how long a specific file is kept and place legal holds that prevent misuse of sensitive documents.
All of that is coupled with the patented deduplication technology that Druva uses to reduce the bandwidth requirements of the data it backs up from devices. The market had taken notice. The startup claims to have seen a 50 percent surge in customers since its previous funding round last October, with a total of 2.8 million devices across 3,000 organizations in some 76 countries now protected by inSync. Several names stand out among the companies that signed up for the service in that period, including Dell, Inc., Hitachi Ltd. and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, Inc., among others.
Druva said the new funding, which brings its total raised to a formidable $67 million, will be used to establish a stronger presence in international markets. The company also plans to roll out more features for inSync and develop new products, but didn’t elaborate on its development roadmap.
Image courtesy Druva