Pune-based Druva software, which makes enterprise backup software, has just cosed a $12 million round of funding from Nexus Venture Partners and existing investory Sequoia. In April 2010, they had raised $5 million from Sequoia and the Indian Angel Investors.
This funding is going to be used by Druva to make a strong push into cloud-based backup. Cloud infrastructure for a bandwidth and storage intensive like backup can be a significant expense, and of course, sales and marketing too.
A few weeks back a partially inaccurate version of this story had been leaked by Economic Times and was reported by PuneTech, but we “withdrew” the story after Druva called us up and let us know that it was premature to talk about it. Talking about a company’s funding round before everything is finalized and the money is in the bank is dangerous for a number of reasons including:
- Funding is a tricky thing and there are no guarantees until the money is in the bank. Many things can, and do go wrong. One bad day on the stock market can cause VCs to reconsider any deals that are not final.
- From the time the startup received a term-sheet from the VC until the deal is finalized, there is usually a no shopping clause which prevents the startup from talking about the details of the deal with anybody else. This is to ensure that the startup does not use this offer to try and create a bidding war between VCs. Hence, if the details leak out the VCs might feel that the startup is trying to violate the no shopping clause
- Most importantly, if word leaks out that a VC is funding a company for amount X, then in next few days is is possible that the VC’s contacts in the industry (probably other VCs) keep saying “Why are you paying X? I don’t think it is worth more than Y?” and this can cause the VC to reconsider the deal. This is very dangerous for the startup.
This time however, the news is official (and is actually better than the deal reported by Indian Express).
As for what Druva does exactly, and why it is one of our favorite Pune companies, just read the previous article, which had a bunch of links. Here are some other interesting tidbits about Druva:
- “Druva’s disruptive innovation reduces the storage footprint and bandwidth requirement for backup by orders of magnitude compared to other industry solutions” -Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Nexus
- Druva, founded in 2007, has amassed more than 750 customers and protects more than 300,000 endpoints (i.e. servers, laptops, PCs) worldwide
- InSync’s global, source-based deduplication reduces bandwidth and storage by 90 percent while providing 100 percent accuracy for Microsoft Outlook and Office applications