Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

Cloud Data Manager Rubrik is Flush With Cash 

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Rubrik, the cloud data management startup and cash magnet, said this week it has completed its latest funding round, generating a hefty $180 million and raising its venture capital haul to $292 million in four funding rounds.

Founded in early 2014 by veteran engineers from Data Domain, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and VMware (NYSE: VMW), the startup offers application development tools that combine enterprise data management with web-scale IT.

The latest funding round was led by IVP (Institutional Venture Partners) along with earlier investors Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. IVP also was an early investor in API specialist Mulesoft (NYSE: MULE) and Snapchat (NYSE: SNAP), which both went public in March.

Rubrik said it would use its deep pockets to expand product development and global technology investments.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company claims a run-rate approaching $100 million in its first six quarters and a market valuation estimated at $1.3 billion. Fortune 500 customers come from the financial services, government, healthcare and retail sectors.

The startup appears to have caught the wave of hybrid and multi-cloud adoption as large enterprises look to leverage public cloud flexibility to help deliver distributed applications and other data management services.

Rubrik said it has launched eight products over the last two years that support more than a dozen applications across multiple cloud platforms. For example, it recently announced cloud native applications running on Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft Azure (NASDAQ: MSFT) along with data orchestration tools operating across multiple clouds.

"We have not even dipped into the $61 million from Series C since we’ve been judiciously fueling our hyper-growth with cash flow," boasted Bipul Sinha, Rubrik's co-founder and CEO, in a blog post. "This financing allows us to accelerate our innovation pace and build a global brand, all while upending a stagnant industry of legacy players."

The company argues there is a huge unmet need for a cloud native data management approach. Hence, Rubrik seeks to go beyond simplifying data backup and recovery to offer "instant data access for recovery, analytics, compliance and search," Sinha said.

Sinha was also a founding investor in enterprise virtualization and storage vendor Nutanix. Arvind Jain, a former Google distinguished engineer, serves as Rubrik's vice president of engineering.

Rubrik's data management approach is designed to allow enterprises to provision data for application development regardless of where apps reside. Hence, data can move securely between datacenters and the cloud.

The startup's surge also is fueled by the steady enterprise shift to cloud-based analytics. Rubrik and a band of data management upstarts anticipated the impact of database deployments along with the resulting data explosion. That is forcing companies to reconsider data management schemes as they increasingly seek to unlock silos of enterprise application data for business analytics.

 

About the author: George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

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