Sequoia-backed SaaS firm Druva enters unicorn club with $130 mn funding round

Cloud data backup and recovery firm Druva Inc. has raised $130 million (around Rs 902.5 crore at current exchange rate) in a fresh round of funding led by Viking Global Investors. The funding round puts the Sunnyvale-based company’s valuation north of $1 billion, making it the only second software-as-a-service (SaaS) company to have achieved the coveted unicorn status in India after Chennai-headquartered Freshworks.

Neuberger Berman and Atreides Capital are the two other new investors taking part in this round while existing investors including Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital and Nexus have also contributed.

The investment will be used to fuel growth and global expansion as well as drive new product innovations, the company said in a statement.

Druva was founded in Pune by Jaspreet Singh, an Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati graduate, along with Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman - —all former employees of storage management firm Veritas - back in 2008.

The company delivers data protection and management for the cloud. Druva’s cloud platform is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It claims to help customers reduce costs by up to 50% by freeing them from unnecessary hardware, capacity planning, and software management. Druva has more than 4,000 enterprise customers including Flex, Hitachi, Live Nation, Marriott, and Pfizer.

“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,” Singh said.

The current round takes the company’s overall external funding to $328 million.

Druva had previously raised $80 million in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital in 2017. Sequoia Capital India, Nexus Venture Partners, NTT Finance, Tenaya Capital and most other existing venture investors also participated in this round.

In September 2016, the company had raised $51 million led by Sequoia Capital India. The company had received $25 million in its Series D round in 2014 and an equal amount in Series C funding the year before. In 2011, it secured $12 million in its Series B round of funding.

Freshworks, a cloud-based business software firm, become the first SaaS company to get the unicorn tag when it raised raised $100 million (around Rs 685 crore then) in its Series G round of funding in July 2018. Global venture capital firms Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital led the investment with participation from CapitalG, the VC arm of tech giant Google’s parent firm Alphabet. Freshworks’ suite of business software products includes Freshdesk, customer relationship management software and other products including IT support and call centre services.