Acronis Raises $147 Million To Pursue M&A, North American Expansion

The investment from Goldman Sachs will help Acronis fast-track product development through acquisitions, build more data centers, and expand its engineering team in Singapore, Bulgaria and Arizona.

Acronis has received a $147 million investment from Goldman Sachs to make acquisitions, boost the engineering team, and expand in North America.

The Schaffhausen, Switzerland-based data protection and cybersecurity company said investment will help Acronis acquire new teams and technologies to fuel development of the company's product portfolio. The new infusion of funds has resulted in a valuation of more than $1 billion for Acronis, establishing it as cybersecurity's newest unicorn.

"The investment round led by Goldman Sachs will help us to fast-track the product development through acquisitions of companies and additional resources, and accelerate the growth," Acronis founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov said in a statement.

[Related: Acronis, Boston Red Sox Partner To Boost Data Transport, Protection]

Acronis also intends to use proceeds from the funding round to build additional data centers and expand its engineering team in Singapore, Bulgaria and Arizona. The company is also looking to bolster its business growth in North America through a partnership with Acronis SCS, an independent software vendor and distributor for the public sector.

The company serves more than 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses, including 80 percent of the Fortune 1000. Its cyberprotection products are available through 50,000 partners and service providers in more than 150 countries and over 30 languages.

Acronis was founded in 2003, employs more than 1,400 people, and has now raised $158 million in two rounds of outside funding, according to Crunchbase. The latest round from Goldman Sachs comes more than 15 years after Acronis raised $11 million from Insight Venture Partners, Crunchbase indicated.

"We are excited to invest in Acronis at this stage of rapid growth," Holger Staude, vice president of GS Growth, said in a statement. “The traditional backup and data protection market is changing."

The cyberprotection play by Acronis is focused on ensuring the safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity and security of data, according to the company. Acronis said it fuses traditional data protection and cybersecurity together into a single integrated offering.

Acronis last year unveiled a new channel program aimed at streamlining and simplifying processes for solution providers working mostly with on-premises business. Specifically, the program applied deal registration, MDFs and rebates across all Acronis product lines to make it easier for partners to work with the company.

Also in 2018, Acronis bought Bulgarian-based company T-Soft to provide manual and automated software testing services. This was the fourth acquisition in Acronis' history, and the company's first since September 2014, when it purchased both business continuity provider nScaled and cloud backup platform BackupAgent.

This April, Acronis broke into Major League Baseball with a three-year agreement to serve as the official cyberprotection partner of the Boston Red Sox. The company will help the defending World Series champions with data movement and data protection before potentially branching out into disaster recovery, Randy George, the Red Sox's senior director of technology operations, told CRN at the time.