Stealth-emerging Israeli startup Eon says it transforms traditional, hard-to-use cloud backups into easy-to-manage assets with granular restores and searchable database snapshots.
Eon, previously known as PolarKeep, was formally founded in January this year by CEO Ofir Ehrlich, CTO Ron Kimchi, and CRO Gonen Stein. It says it monitors cloud resource sprawl and brings cloud backup posture management (CBPM) to enterprises. Eon replaces legacy backup tools and generic snapshots, transforming backups into useful, easy-to-manage assets.
The three founders have an AWS background. Ehrlich co-founded Israeli DR startup CloudEndure in 2014 as VP for R&D. When it was bought by AWS for around $200 million in January 2019, he became AWS’s head of engineering, app migration services, and elastic DR – effectively the CloudEndure business unit inside AWS until March 2023. He is an angel investor with a substantial startup portfolio.
Stein was a CTERA tech sales director then a co-founder of Cloud Endure. After the acquisition, he became AWS’s product owner for migration and DR services. Kimchi was AWS’s general manager for DR and cloud migration, joining AWS from Algotech in September 2019.
Since January 2024, Eon says it has secured a $20 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Vine Ventures, Meron Capital, and Eight Roads. Then a $30 million A-round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Sheva, and a $77 million B-round led by Greenoaks with participation from Quiet Ventures followed.
That makes a total of $127 million raised, from seed funding to B-round, in just nine months – surely some kind of startup funding record, and indicative of Eon hitting its product development milestones rapidly.
Ehrlich said: “We are fortunate to have supportive funding partners who deeply understand the value of unlocking cloud backups to be truly automated, globally searchable, portable, and useful.”
Greenoaks partner Patrick Backhouse said: “Storage and backup are among the largest parts of the IT budget. Yet customers are stuck with frustrating, outdated options, leaving them with poorly optimized costs, incomplete data inventories, and shallow classification. Eon has the team, the expertise, and the ambition to develop an entirely new product that we believe will become the cognitive referent for cloud-native backup.”
Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire said: “In an industry where file restoration can take weeks, Eon’s novel backup solution pinpoints data instantly, saving time, money, and compliance headaches for customers.”
Eon notes that the global cloud infrastructure market is growing at an aggressive pace, expected to reach $838 billion by 2034, with enterprises estimating that 10 to 30 percent of their total cloud bill will be spent on backup storage and management. Current backup management methods, Eon claims, require time-consuming, manual data classification and tagging processes, agents and appliances, with mounting prohibitive costs, and ultimately produce backups that are not accessible.
Ehrlich states: “Eon has reimagined what backups can be for enterprises by introducing a new era of cloud backup storage and management.”
Eon claims its software, which is fully managed and portable, autonomously scans, maps, and classifies cloud resources continuously, providing backup recommendations based on business and compliance needs, and ensuring the appropriate backup policy is in use. Existing backup offerings, it claims, rely on snapshots, which are non-searchable black boxes that require full restores and are vendor-locked.
In contrast, Eon’s backup storage provides global search capabilities, enabling customers to find and restore individual files. They can even run SQL queries on Eon’s backed-up database snapshots, which are searchable, without any resource provisioning. This suggests that Eon produces and stores backup file and database record metadata to provide the search repository.
We asked Gonen Stein questions about Eon’s technology.
Blocks & Files: Which cloud resources does Eon automatically scan, map and classify?
Gonen Stein: Eon supports scanning and backing up cloud resources including; block, file, and object storage, as well as managed and unmanaged databases. Eon will continue to roll out support for additional cloud infrastructure resources.
Blocks & Files: How does Eon provide continuous backup recommendations based on business and compliance needs, and what do you mean by ‘the appropriate backup policy’?
Gonen Stein: Eon continuously scans cloud resources and then maps and classifies them based on environment type (prod/dev/staging / QA…), and data classes (PII, PHI, financial info…), all with no tagging required.
After mapping and classifying resources, Eon applies the appropriate backup policies on the mapped resources, based on the customer backup requirement (i.e.: production workloads containing PII data need to be backed up for 90 days, across cloud regions). This helps customers set backup retention to the right period, reducing storage costs associated with over-backing-up data, while preventing unnecessary business exposure.
This automated approach is in contrast to today’s completely manual process, where customers need to constantly tag resources, and then manually associate backup policies based on resource tags.
Blocks & Files: You say Eon’s next generation of backup storage is fully managed and portable- where is it portable to?
Gonen Stein: Eon creates a new tier of backup storage (we call them Eon snapshots), which does not rely on traditional vendor-locked cloud snapshots. Eon snapshots can be backed up from one cloud provider to another and also support restoration to a different cloud provider.
Blocks & Files: How does it provide global search capabilities?
Gonen Stein: Eon’s new tier of storage (Eon snapshots), is automatically indexed, and unlike traditional black-boxed snapshots, is globally searchable. This means that a user can search for any backed-up files, or DB tables, without having to know what snapshot it was stored in.
Blocks & Files: You have said that snapshots are non-searchable, so how do your customers find and restore individual files and run SQL queries on backed-up database snapshots?
Gonen Stein: To clarify, traditional snapshots (such as EBS snapshots and RDS snapshots) are not searchable. Eon snapshots are searchable. In addition to Eon’s global search capabilities, Eon also provides a database explorer, which allows customers to run a SQL query right on top of database backups, without requiring the customer to restore and provision full databases, before attempting to retrieve DB records.
Blocks & Files: How do you restore individual files without any resource provisioning?
Gonen Stein: Eon Snapshots allows restoring files directly from the Eon console by searching for files in the backups, selecting specific files (from any backed-up version), and restoring them. This is in contrast to files stored in traditional snapshots, which require the customer to first figure out where the files are stored, then restore the whole snapshot (all or nothing), and only then locate the specific file in the restored volume.
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There is no connection, as we understand it, between Eon and Infortrend’s EonCloud products, nor between Eon and the similarly named German multinational electric utility company.
