Blocks & Files’ sources in the storage industry say that Kasten’s founders are brewing a startup connected to data management, just over a year after Veeam acquired their container data protection operation.
Update. Alcion.ai is the Kasten founders’ new company. 25 August 2022.
Niraj Tolia and Vaibhav Kamra co-founded Kasten in January 2017 to provide data protection and disaster recovery to Kubernetes-orchestrated cloud-native applications. That startup was bought by Veeam in October 2020. Business results appear to have been good; the Kasten business unit said it grew bookings 900 percent year-on-year in the final 2021 quarter, albeit without revealing the base number of bookings.
B&F has heard they are clambering aboard the startup train again, as Veeam works to scale Kasten. Seemingly they haven’t lost their appetite for risk, multi-year buildouts, and having to sell a new concept.
We don’t know the precise technology focus of their new venture, but we’ve heard it involves data management, security, software-as-a-service (SaaS), machine learning (ML), and the public cloud. This could include current all-in public cloud users and hybrid on-premises/public cloud users.
Their new company is called Alcion and it has a website.
Before Kasten, Tolia and Kamra were instrumental in the success of Maginatics, a startup that built distributed file systems and was subsequently acquired by Dell EMC. The founders transformed the Maginatics product into the CloudBoost product family that became the public cloud enabler for several of EMC’s data protection products.
