Salesforce specialist OwnBackup achieves unicorn status

OwnBackup, the backup for Salesforce vendor, has bagged $167.5m at a $1.4bn valuation in a D-series round, taking total funding to $267.5m.

The startup, which was founded in 2012, will spend the cash on “ongoing investments in global expansion and extend OwnBackup’s platform to help companies big and small manage and secure their most mission-critical SaaS data.”

OwnBackup is present in the Salesforce AppExchange. It offers secure, automated daily backups of Salesforce SaaS and PaaS data, restoration, disaster recovery and management tools to pinpoint backup gaps.

The company said it has almost 3000 customers on its books, up from 2000 in July 2020, including 400 new customers gained in most recent quarter. “As cloud adoption and digital transformation accelerate, the data produced by and stored in SaaS applications is growing even faster,” Sam Gutmann, CEO said. “Our platform is purpose-built for cloud-to-cloud backup and protection and this latest round of funding is the next step in our mission to help our customers truly own their SaaS data.”

There is plenty of scope for expansion. OwnBackup’s customer count is a fraction of Salesforce, which has over 150,000 customers.

OwnBackups six consecutive years of increased funding rounds. Spot a hockey stick curve? The VCs are sure excited.

OwnBackup’s announcement says it is a cloud data protection platform company, with nothing about being specific to Salesforce. It currently supports four SaaS applications: Salesforce, Sage Business Cloud Financials, Veeva (life sciences) and nCino (financial data). It mentioned possible expansion to cover Workday in April last year.

Competitors in the Salesforce backup market include AvePoint, CloudAlly, Commvault (with Metallic), Druva, Odaseva, Kaseya’s Spanning and Skyvia. None of the other big backup suppliers, such as Acronis, Cohesity, Dell EMC, Rubrik, Veeam, and Veritas, appear to have Salesforce-specific capabilities yet.

The new funding was co-led by Insight Partners, Salesforce Ventures, and Sapphire Ventures, with participation from existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Vertex Ventures, and Oryzn Capital.

Note. Cohesity does provides backup for Salesforce, albeit not native (yet!). It’s enabled through an app in the Cohesity Marketplace.