Containerized app data protector Trilio has pulled in $17 million in a third funding round and appointed a new CEO.
Former CEO David Safaii becomes executive chairman of the board and so holds some of the reins controlling Massood Zarrabian, the incoming CEO. Zarrabian was previously chairman and CEO of enterprise search supplier BA Insight but left that company in June this year after it was acquired by Upland in February. Previous companies he led – such as Certeon, OutStart and ServiceSoft – were all acquired. That may be exactly the outcome Safaii wants.
Zarrabian said in a statement: “The company has established a leading position in the new growth category of Kubernetes with unique application resiliency technology, strong partnerships and a passionate team. Our goal is to leverage those resources to help customers meet their mandates for multi-cloud application mobility, ransomware protection and compliance with disaster recovery protocols.”
Trilio was started in 2013 by CTO Murali Balcha with David Safaii coming on board as CEO in 2014. It was intent on developing Kubernetes-orchestrated container protection with its TrilioVault technology. The company raised $5 million in an A-round in 2017 and then $12 million at the end of 2020 in a B-round along with $3 million debt financing. It claimed to have had 300 percent revenue growth in the first half of 2020, riding on the enterprise Kubernetes adoption wave, although one doesn’t know the base.
This third round is technically part of the two-year-old B-round, with cash coming from existing investor SKK Ventures and T-Mobile Ventures, Wayra Telefónica Innovation, Raiven Capital, Genesis Accel, .406 Ventures, and Jack Egan. It brings total funding up to $36 million. Trilio says it will use the cash for product development, engineering and customer operations to help business growth in the cloud-native application resiliency market.
Trilio also appointed Christina Lattuca as CFO and VP for operations, replacing Rich Stoller, VP for Finance and Operations, who left in August. He joined Intuitive in the same role.
The TrilioVault for Kubernetes SaaS offering supports various K8S distributions such as Rancher Kubernetes Engine (RKE), Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Red Hat OpenShift. It has a management console facility which discovers K8s-built apps and applies protection policies. Trilio has certified Cassandra, Mongo and MySQL databases for app-consistent backups and restores.
v3.0 TrilioVault, announced in October, added Continuous Restore with faster levels of replication, restoration and migration of Kubernetes data and metadata from any cloud or storage platform to another. It’s said to provide near-instantaneous recovery times for cloud-native apps.
Corporate strategy
Safaii is focusing on the strategic needs of the organization, including corporate and business development. What might a corporate development strategy entail?
Containerized app protection startups Portworx and Kasten were acquired by Pure Storage and Veeam earlier in 2020 for $370 million and $150 million respectively. That made Trilio and fellow startup Robin.io potential acquisition targets for established data protection suppliers that lack cloud-native data protection technology.
Robin.io has a 5G Edge infrastructure focus, and petabyte-size deployments with its software running on tens of thousands of servers in production. It was bought by Japan’s Rakuten in March this year, leaving Trilio as the last K8s data protection startup standing.
And now it has a new CEO and the previous four companies he ran were all acquired. Coincidence? We don’t think so.
