It was only a few short years ago that Clumio was operating under Silicon Valley's radar. Founded in 2017, the data protection provider calmly went about the business of building enterprise-ready backup and recovery solutions and officially launched in 2019. The cloud-computing company took the market by storm and raised $186 million in funding within three months of opening their doors.
“What we’ve built at Clumio is essentially a cloud data fabric that is completely built on top of the public cloud to take advantage of the cloud the right way,” said Poojan Kumar, CEO and co-founder.
The cloud company rolled out its first solutions in 2019, which supports VMware workloads running both onsite and VMware-on-AWS. Clumio’s offerings also support public cloud arrangements with full functionality in the AWS environment. The startup's genius lies with its holistic approach to making dispersed data safe so customers can focus on what's important – running a successful business. Kumar points out that his firm has a leg up on competitors because they aren't limited by legacy environments or a "lift and shift" mentality. Clumio was “born in the cloud” and scales without problems, is easy to manage, and offers predictable price options.
Since introducing its SaaS products to the world last year, Kumar's company has secured 8 PB of customer data and tripled its workforce. More specifically, Clumio brought on 80 more people across all locations and opened a research and development center in Bangalore. The firm also made several strategic executive hires, including Chadd Kenney, VP, and chief technologist; Brian Kerr, VP Finance; Shane Jackson, VP marketing; Glenn Mulvaney, VP cloud operations and security; Sandeep Soni, GM, and VP, engineering, India Operations; Jess Taclas, VP inside sales; and Chris Degnan, board member.
According to IDC, data protection as a service market – including backup, disaster, and recovery cloud services – is forecasted to reach the $10 billion mark by 2022. It's a big market with plenty of room to grow, and Kumar plans to build on his firm's backup success to expand into other areas. "We picked backup as the first service because it's obviously a huge market," he said. “Our goal is to into data management via the backup service as we start managing more and more of our customers data.”
Other firms like Rubrik and Cohesity began life as a single service startup but grew their offerings into other areas as they matured. Both tech firms onboarded more cloud-based applications to secure and manage enterprise data stored online. Veeam also began life as a means to backup VMware workloads but quickly expanded to accommodate non-VM workloads.
