Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Investors Continue to Bank on Cloud Manager Rubrik 

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Tech company valuations and private equity funding rounds continue to soar as data become the keys to the realm and greater volumes are managed in the cloud.

The latest example comes from cloud data manager Rubrik, which this week reported an eye-popping $261 million funding round led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures. Rubrik now claims a company valuation of $3.3 billion. So far, the startup it has raised more than $553 million.

Also participating were existing investors Greylock Partners, IVP (Institutional Venture Partners), Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

With the cloud data management market pegged by industry tracker IDC at $48 billion annually, cloud startups like Rubrik are pushing deeper into enterprise cloud operations. Bipul Sinha, Rubrik’s co-founder and CEO and, previously, a founding investor in enterprise virtualization and storage vendor Nutanix, said the latest cash haul will be used for new product development.

“These new products will further capitalize on the sweeping enterprise transition to public cloud and the explosion of data,” the startup said Tuesday (Jan. 15) in announcing its latest funding round.

Along with leading pubic cloud vendors Amazon Web Services. Google and Microsoft, Palo Alto-based Rubrik also works with storage, networking and database partners, including Cisco Systems, Nutanix, Oracle, Pure Storage, SAP and VMware. Former Cisco CEO John Chambers joined Rubrik’s board last year.

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

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 latest funding announcement underscores the growing importance of cloud data management as databases and other data stores shift to the cloud. For example, IBM and log data management startup LogDNA announced collaboration in November for a new cloud service designed to help developers spot faults and debug code in data stored in the IBM cloud.

 

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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