Goldman Sachs has led a $147m funding round in Acronis which values the data recovery and protection vendor at more than one billion dollars and gives it unicorn status.
Acronis will use the money for acquisitions, engineering hires, data centre expansion and to increase public sector revenues in North America.
Founded in 2003, Acronis is headquartered in Singapore and Switzerland and has more than 1,400 employees. The company claims more than 500,000 business customers, five million consumer customers, 50,000 channel and service provider partners in 150 countries.
Serguei Beloussov, Acronis co-founder, chairman and CEO, said in a statement announcing the new funding that the company grew 20 per cent in 2018, and this year is gunning for 30 per cent growth. He expects Acronis Cyber Cloud business to grow more than 100 per cent this year.
Backup bonanza
The backup world is embracing cyber protection and cloud-based services. As customers adopt the public cloud there is an opportunity for new backup providers to jump in and offer cloud-based services complementing existing on-premises backup arrangements. It’s a gold rush or in Acronis’s case, a Goldman Sachs rush.
Acronis’s competitor Veeam took in $500m in January this year. Rubrik and Cohesity, are funded to the tune of $552m and $410m respectively. Druva had a $130m round this year taking total funding to $328m and also gaining unicorn status. And new startup Clumio entered the cloud backup-as-a-service space with $51m in funding in August.
