Druva raises $12 million for enterprise backups

Enterprise data protection solution funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital

Druva, provider of enterprise data protection solutions, announced Wednesday that it has raised a $12 million Series B funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital.

Additionally, Jaspreet Singh, co-founder and CEO of Druva, has been named chairman of the board. Other board members include Shailendra Singh (managing director at Sequoia), Jishnu Bhattacharjee (principal at Nexus), Ramani Kothandaraman (co-founder and COO of Druva) and Yoram Novick (CEO and founder of Topio, another enterprise data company).

The primary offering from Druva is inSync, fully automated laptop software built to backup sensitive corporate data for office and remote users, in case of damage or theft of laptop. Using “data deduplication,” inSync only saves a single copy of data for all users, which Druva says speeds backups tenfold and saves up to 90 percent bandwidth and storage.

Designed for a mobile workforce that needs to access data at anytime from anywhere, Druva inSync also supports tablets and smartphones, which are increasingly used by business personnel and, in turn, increasingly carry sensitive data.

“Organizations are waking up to the fact that they have important data resident on endpoint devices that is not adequately protected, but should be. Loss of data resident on endpoint devices can prove devastating,” writes Sheila Childs, research vice president at analyst firm Gartner, in a March 2011 report.

“Many mobile workers are high contributors to the success of the business, and carry data on their laptops that would be difficult to reconstruct if the device is destroyed or stolen.”

With inSync, administrators can manage their storage, user profiles and folders for backup from a single dashboard, which is supposed to reduce the pain and time typically sacrificed to secure backups.

Druva last raised $5 million in April 2010, in a round led by Sequoia.

The new funding will be used to expand product sales and marketing in North America, EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) and Asia Pacific.