Data Protection Vendor Druva Raises $130M In Push Toward IPO

Druva plans to boost its revenue, geographic footprint, and market prowess before pursuing an initial public offering between 12 and 18 months from now, CEO Jaspreet Singh says.

Data protection vendor Druva has closed a $130 million round led by Viking Global Investors to fuel global expansion and drive new product innovations.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based cloud data protection and management provider said the investment will help Druva gain deeper insight into data for more informed decision making. The proceeds will also allow Druva to better serve its customers by expanding geographically and doubling down on customer service, company founder and CEO Jaspreet Singh wrote in a blog post.

"Druva is disrupting the way enterprises protect and leverage their data with a modern, cloud-native SaaS platform," Singh said in a statement. "Today's funding will help Druva to power data protection for the cloud era, and accelerate our momentum to better serve the needs of enterprise customers."

[Related: Druva Works With AWS To Bring One-Click Disaster Recovery As A Service]

Singh told CRN that Druva is looking to conduct an initial public offering 12-to-18 months from now assuming that market conditions are ripe. By then, Singh expects Druva to have more revenue, better geographic expansion, enhanced technology, and be addressing a larger portion of the market.

From a technology standpoint, Singh said Druva plans to expand its data management tools around new applications as customers increasingly deploy cloud workloads in SaaS apps like Slack and Workday. Druva launched support around Salesforce and Amazon DynamoDB last year, Singh said, and hopes to apply more of its data protection capabilities in the Industrial IoT space.

Druva also wants to explore how it can use business intelligence and other organic or inorganic technology to add more value to the data it's already captured, Singh said. The company also plans to help enterprises keep their data lake and backup systems separate, as well as address governance and compliance issues like GDPR, according to Singh.

As far a geography is concerned, Singh said Druva wants to go from getting 20 percent of its revenue outside North America today to getting 30 percent of its revenue abroad within the next two years. The company recently opened offices in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan and Southeast Asia, and plans to use the proceeds from this funding round to invest more in those regions, according to Singh.

In addition, Singh said Druva intends to establish footholds in both Australia and the Nordics since both markets are very strong when it comes to instances of AWS. All told, Singh said Druva has been growing revenue at 50 percent on a year-over-year basis, and should be able to continue expanding sales at that rate for at least another year before the "law of great numbers" starts to kick in.

Druva is also in the process of massively expanding its workforce, going from 450 employees a year ago to 720 workers today to an anticipated 1,000 employees by the start of 2020, Singh said. On the technical side, Singh said Druva hopes to hire a small number of highly-skilled machine learning and data science experts to help the company better understand what can be done with data in the enterprise.

Most of the new headcount, though, will come in sales and marketing, where Singh said Druva plans to hire in positions ranging from account managers to channel managers to inside and outside salespeople.

Druva works with roughly 30 to 40 solution providers globally today, and runs virtually all of its business through the channel, according to Singh. The company plans to "strategically and cautiously" expand its partner base as it moves into Australia and the Nordics, Singh said, and is also keeping an eye on what level of partner coverage makes sense in the United States.

In the U.S., Singh said Druva currently works with the cloud business units of master VARs such as CDW and SHI, as well as solution providers with a significant focus on cloud generally and AWS in particular.

"We're always looking for partners who are very strategic with AWS," Singh said.