Exclusive: Clumio expelio’s sales staff as it retreats to the cloud

Clumio is laying off up to half the sales team, according to sources, in a reorganisation that sees the backup software vendor pivot to “cloud-first”. The company did not directly answer our question if that meant it was pivoting to cloud-only – i.e. withdrawing from actively selling on-premises solutions.

A company spokesperson told us: “In 2020, Clumio doubled its total staff headcount to steadily define, develop and deliver on its ‘all cloud’ enterprise data protection vision. As a result, we’ve seen increased demand for our cloud-first offerings throughout 2020.

“As Clumio works to anticipate and meet this growing customer demand, we are amplifying our cloud efforts and restructuring a very small part of our sales team. We’ve actively communicated this with our internal team, and we look forward to delivering a customer-proven, cloud-agnostic SaaS solution for tomorrow’s cloud enterprise.”

Clumio has been named one of the “Built In 2021 Best Places to Work” companies and received three awards – Built In San Francisco’s 2021 Best Places to Work, 2021 Best Midsize Companies to Work For, and 2021 SF Best Paying Companies. LinkedIn shows 186 employees.

Clumio competes in a hotly-contested market against suppliers including Acronis, Cohesity, Commvault, Druva, Rubrik and Veeam.

The company was started in 2017 by the founders of PernixData, which was acquired by Nutanix in August 2016. Clumio has raised $185m in funding, including a $135m C-round in 2019.

Its SaaS software can have a single set of policies defined to protect AWS EBS volumes, Microsoft 365 email and VMware VMs, regardless of whether they run on-premises or in the cloud. Clumio in December 2020 announced RansomProtect, which it said was the industry’s first virtual air-gapped ransomware protection for private and public clouds and SaaS applications.