Veeam has acquired SaaS ap Alcion, appointing its co-founding CEO Niraj Tolia as CTO.
Alcion was founded in 2022 by Tolia and Vaibhav Kamra, VP Engineering, to back up and protect Microsoft 365 with AI-powered threat detection. It raised $8 million in seed funding in May last year and Veeam participated in a $21 million A-round a year ago. Now Veeam has bought the whole company, IP, product, and workforce, making a second buyout exit for Tolia and Kamra. The acquisition cost has not been revealed.
Veeam CEO Anand Eswaran stated: “Niraj is one of those rare individuals who not only understands where the market is headed but also possesses the skills and vision to bring that future to life for our customers.”
Tolia and Kamra had previously co-founded Kasten, a Kubernetes container backup company. Veeam paid $150 million in stock and cash for Kasten and its K10 software in October 2020. At that time Danny Allan was CTO. He resigned in January this year to become Snyk’s CTO. Now Tolia takes up that position, with Kamra appointed Veeam’s VP for Technology.
Eswaran said Kasten “has become the #1 solution for Kubernetes data resilience since being acquired by Veeam.”
The data protection leader says Tolia will work closely with chief product officer Anton Gostev. A Tolia blog says: “Our charter is to continue to invest in, and build out, the Veeam Data Cloud platform. Combining the AI and Security capabilities of the Alcion platform with the scale of VDC – the fastest-growing Veeam product ever – is going to deliver great value to every Alcion and Veeam customer, current and future.” The intent, Veeam states, is to develop the Veeam Data Cloud (VDC) into a “powerful, flexible suite of services.”
At Alcion, Tolia and Kamra’s software “leveraged powerful AI techniques to learn user behavior, schedule backups intelligently, remove malware, detect ransomware, and proactively schedule backups when threat signals are detected.” We can envisage this approach being added to VDC. Protecting customer data in SaaS apps and helping customer data both on-premises and in the public cloud/SaaS environment to be more cyber-resilient are two of the main developments in the data protection market.
Before founding Kasten, Tolia led product development at Maginatics, a startup acquired by Dell EMC’s Data Protection Group.
