Data protection company Druva raises $25M

Druva will use the money to expand globally, specifically to countries in western Europe

Endpoint security vendor Druva has raised $25 million in Series C funding, it was announced on Tuesday. The new funding came from existing investors Sequoia Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, as well as new investor Tenaya Capital.

Druva had previously raised $5 million in April 2010, in a round led by Sequoia and then another $12 million from Nexus Venture Partners and Sequoia in August 2011. This latest funding round brings the total capital raised to $42 million.

Druva will use the funding to expand global sales and marketing, specifically to Western Europe, in countries that include Germany and the United Kingdom, Jaspreet Singh, founder and CEO of Druva, told me in an interview.

Calling the region the "obvious next step," as it has "a number of mature economies,"  Singh noted that Druva does have presence there, but it is not yet significant. 

The new funding will also go toward underwriting research and development, and expanding Druva’s cloud infrastructure to support new deployments by large enterprises.

In addition to the funding news, it was also announced that Tom Banahan, Managing Director of Tenaya Capital will be joining the Druva board of directors.

The Sunnyvale, California-based Druva offers data protection for businesses by offering a full suite of endpoint data management solutions for enterprise laptops, PCs, smartphones, and tablets. The software helps companies manage the risk of losing data.

The primary offering from Druva is inSync, which currently safeguards corporate information assets on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones in 76 countries. It gives an enterprise's mobile workforce backup, IT-managed file sharing, data loss prevention, and rich analytics.

A large percentage of the workforce, as much as 75%, is now on mobile, making it so that users are connecting from diverse locations, and work unpredictable schedules. That also means they may now be on secure networks, so Druva provides secure access, self-service restore, and secure file sharing. 

"There is a big need for this type of protection," said Singh. "28% of data is exclusively delivered on end points. They need someone to protect it."

Losing data can have a big financial impact on a company. A study done by the Ponemon Institute last year, called Quantifying the Value of Unified Endpoint Data Management, found that a company with 10,000 employees can save $26 million a year, from endpoint backup, data file protection, file sharing data analytics, and unifying all solutions onto one platform, 

 This translates to a savings per connected user of $8,184. 

The company's biggest competitors are HP and Symantec, Singh said, but there are two factors that separate Druva from the competition. 

The first is the architecture of Druva, which is built all around data protection, and leveraging information in many forms and factors.

“We call it the 'separation of data and metadata'” said Singh, "We understand how the building blocks come together to form meaningful information."

Second, he pointed to the difference in culture between Druva and the other companies.

Druva, he said, is all about innovation and growth, while HP and Symantec "act as an umbrella to distribute other products."

"Symantec hasn't successfully built a product in 10 years. They are all about growth through acquisitions," said Singh. "Innovation is the hunger which drives us. Our innovative culture is very different from what they have internally."

He compared the people who work at Druva to the soliders in the movie 300.

"Remember how he asked, 'What's your profession?' And they were all soldiers. That is that we have: an army of dedicated, hungry soldiers."

Druva has over 2,100 customers right now and is growing growing 3 1/2% year to year, or 50% every quarter.

The company was founded in 2008 in India, and was bootstrapped for the first two years, until it branches out to North America. It now has offices in the United States, India and the United Kingdom.

"There was hardly any venture capital, or expertise, in India to build a startup," Singh told me. "So a big part of what I want to do is give back to community, and help build a culture of innovation in both the U.S and in India."