Data protection company Commvault is buying AWS cloud data protector Clumio for $47 million – significantly less than Clumio’s total funding.
Clumio was founded in 2017 and provides SaaS data protection services to Amazon’s S3, EC2, EBS, RDS, SQL on EC2, DynamoDB, VMware on AWS, and Microsoft 365, storing its backups in virtual air-gapped AWS repositories. Its CEO is Rick Underwood, who has been CEO for three months since his promotion from CRO in June. Co-founder and board chair Poojan Kumar was the previous CEO.
Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani said: “Combining Commvault’s industry-leading cyber resilience capabilities with Clumio’s exceptional talent, technology, and AWS expertise advances our recovery offerings, strengthens our platform, and reinforces our position as a leading SaaS provider for cyber resilience.”
Kumar added: “At Clumio, our vision was to build a platform that could scale quickly to protect the world’s largest and most complex data sets, including data lakes, warehouses, and other business-critical data. Joining hands with Commvault allows us to get our cloud-native offerings to AWS customers on a global scale.”
Clumio has raised $262 million in funding, with the latest being a $75 million D-round in February this year, four months before Underwood’s promotion. A Commvault SEC filing says the acquisition price is approximately $47 million, a fraction of Clumio’s total funding, seemingly less than Clumio’s D-round in February.
Clumio customers include Atlassian, Cox Automotive, Duolingo, and LexisNexis. Clumio says it has experienced a 4x year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
Commvault’s history shows a focus on on-premises data protection with a move to SaaS-based protection with its 2019-launched Metallic offering. It has become a revenue growth driver for Commvault, along with its cyber-resilience product features. The company reached a quarterly revenue high point of $224.7 million in the second quarter of 2024.
Clumio appointed Carol Hague as VP of Marketing in July as Rick Underwood set about growing the company.
A period of consolidation is now operative in the data protection world. It started with Cohesity buying Veritas in February, and now Commvault has bought Clumio.
The asset acquisition, as Commvault calls it, is expected to close in early October 2024, and be immediately accretive to ARR and revenue, and accretive to free cash flow within the next three quarters. The $47 million cost will be funded with cash on hand. This acquisition follows Commvault’s purchase of cloud resiliency supplier Appranix in April this year.
The “asset acquisition” term indicates that Commvault is not buying the entire Clumio company and its liabilities, only specific assets, which have not been identified.
Commvault has reiterated its fiscal second quarter 2025 earnings guidance previously announced on July 30, 2024. The company reported fiscal 2024 revenues of $839.2 million. In its latest quarter it reported cash and cash equivalents of $287.9 million. Its FY Q2 period ends in September and the earnings guidance is for revenues of $220 million +/-$2 million. Clumio won’t contribute much to this; the quarter is nearly over.
Kumar founded Clumio with CTO Woon Ho Jung and engineering VP Kaustubh Patil. The three previously founded PernixData, which Nutanix bought in August 2016 for 528,517 shares and $1.2 million in cash.
