When a startup’s $10 million in funding is followed two months later by a further $41 million, it’s safe to say they’re tapping into a trend. In the case of Rubrik, that trend is enterprise data management.
Promising an all-in-one approach to enterprise backup and recovery, Rubrik announced its Converged Data Management platform in late March along with its initial funding. Introduced at the time via an early-access program, Rubrik’s technology aims to “eliminate backup software” by fusing enterprise data management with Web-scale IT.
On Tuesday, Rubrik announced the $41 million Series B portion of its funding along with the general availability of its r300 Series hybrid cloud appliance. The Rubrik r300, a 2U unit containing up to four x86 nodes, comes pre-configured with the Rubrik Converged Data Management software.
Bringing its total funding to $51 million, this latest round was led by Greylock Partners with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners and existing angel investors. Fifteen-month-old Rubrik will use the new funding to grow its base of customers and channel partners worldwide, it said.
“Backup is a crowded market, so it is hard for any company to get above the noise,” said George Crump, founder and president of Storage Switzerland.
Yet the market isn’t as hot as flash or software-defined storage, Crump said. “The fact that Rubrik was able to raise this kind of money indicates that they are doing something different.”
Two key differences underlie its approach, he said. First is the convergence of backup software, backup-server hardware and backup storage into a single infrastructure. The second is Rubrik’s scalability.
“Scalability is a rarity when it comes to backup hardware, and I know of no other appliance that provides hardware, software and a scale-out architecture,” Crump said.
The key to Rubrik’s success will be execution.
“Can they deliver on the promise of the platform, and is it that much easier than the status quo?” Crump asked. “If it is, there is no question that the market is ready to abandon the current enterprise offerings. Someone needs to make it far more simpler and more scalable than many of the current offerings do.”