SaaS Startup Clumio Emerges With $51M Backing: 7 Things To Know

From channel strategy to technology differentiation, here are seven things you need to know about the backup-as-a-service startup Clumio.

Everything You Need To Know About Clumio

Clumio launched out of stealth on Tuesday led by technology guru Poojan Kumar (pictured), unveiling its flagship backup Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, which is looking to make waves in the industry.

“We have a very differentiated SaaS service that’s built on the public cloud that allows you to backup both your on-premises workloads as well as workloads running in the public cloud,” said Kumar in an interview with CRN. “From a complexity perspective, things get worse as enterprise customers move into a world of multi-cloud with Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS and VMware Cloud -- that was the reason why we started Clumio.”

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based startup is led by a slew of long-time IT veterans hailing from the likes of VMware and Nutanix and is being backed by Silicon Valley investors.

CRN breaks down the seven most important things you need to know about the backup SaaS startup that is looking to disrupt the market.

Who Is Leading Clumio?

Clumio CEO and co-founder Poojan Kumar became a star engineer at Oracle in the 2000s. He was responsible for building Oracle Exadata, the company’s popular database machine that is currently used by 77 percent of the Fortune 100 companies. In 2012, Kumar -- who was a teenage professional chess player -- founded and led storage software developer PernixData. His storage startup was quickly acquired by hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer Nutanix in 2016. After working for Nutanix for about a year, Kumar created Clumio in 2017.

The startup is led by other engineering veterans including Clumio CTO and co-founder Woon Ho Jung, who helped create VMware Cloud Foundry during his seven-year stint with the virtualization superstar from 2005 to 2012. Additionally, Kaustubh Patil – Clumio’s co-founder and vice president of engineering -- was previously senior director of engineering at Nutanix before joining Clumio.

“My co-founders have been with me since the VMware days,” said Kumar, who worked at VMware from 2010 to 2012 before founding PernixData. “They are very early VMware folks who built the guts of the VMware hypervisor.”

Additionally, Clumio has garnered top level sales experience including Brian O’Shea, vice president of sales for Clumio, who was previously Pure Storage’s vice president of sales in the Americas.

What’s Clumio’s Technology Differentiation?

The startup is jumping into the IT world with a secure SaaS enterprise backup service to run on top of a cloud data fabric, including VMware Cloud for AWS and native AWS workloads. Built from scratch, Clumio’s SaaS backup solution allows enterprises to eliminate hardware and software for on-premise backup and avoid the complexity and cost of running third party backup software in the cloud.

“We have a very differentiated SaaS service that’s built on the public cloud that allows you to backup both your on-premises workloads as well as workloads running in the public cloud,” said Kumar. “It is centered around the complexity of backup. Today, data doesn’t only belong to on-premises. In the on-premises side, backup has been pretty complex in terms of the software and hardware the customer has to manage to just backup their on-premises workloads.”

As businesses move to the cloud, they can leverage Clumio to protect workloads like VMware Cloud on AWS and native AWS services, as well as data regardless of where it resides. “From a complexity perspective, things get worse as enterprise customers move into a world of multi-cloud with Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS and VMware Cloud -- that was the reason why we started Clumio. We fundamentally believe that backup fits the proven model for SaaS,” Kumar said.

Clumio leverages the scale and elasticity of the public cloud to scale dynamically to meet the changing needs of the enterprise. Security is incorporated at the core of its design to provide a secure backup and recovery service for the enterprise.

What Is Clumio’s Channel Strategy?

Kumar said his startup will be a channel-centric vendor for solution providers.

“All of the leads that we have had so far, all the customers have come through the channel for us,” he said. “Fundamentally, the channel itself is looking to figure out how they participate in this whole ‘SaaS-ification’ of the enterprise and the move to the public cloud and still have a lot of relevance. We can have them participate as we grow to have that footprint in the cloud and recurring revenue model that has been exciting for our channel partners.”

The startup currently has about a dozen partners on board. Clumio plans to launch a formal Partner Program in the future that will include training and certifications.

Clumio is currently available across the United States with paying customers and Proof of Concepts in a broad range of midmarket and enterprise customers, according to Kumar. “It’s a completely horizontal play,” he said.

Who’s Funding Clumio?

The startup launched out of stealth with $51 million in funding over two rounds. Sutter Hill Ventures led a Series A round, while the Series B round was driven by Index Ventures with significant participation from Sutter Hill Ventures. Several individual investors experienced in disruptive technologies also participated including, Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Technologies; and John Thompson, chairman of the board at Microsoft.

Kumar told CRN that the funding went towards major R&D and engineering. “This is not something easy to do in terms of multiple disciplines coming together to deliver a SaaS solution like this,” he said. The funding is now being shifted towards ramping up Clumio’s go-to-market efforts in the U.S.

The startup still has the majority of its $51 million funding in its wallet. “We have spent a very small fraction of that $51 million overall,” Kumar said.

How Fast Can You Get Setup?

One of the standout features with the new backup SaaS solution, is that a customer can set up and start protecting data with Clumio in less than 15 minutes. Kumar said the user experience to purchase and set up the solution is very simple.

“You go to Clumio.com. You’re able to login and register for the service. Then we give you a virtual machine -- after some basic handshaking on the security side – a VM that you download on your on-premises vCenter environment or on your VMware Cloud on AWS. As soon as you download it, it just connects to the SaaS service that’s running in the cloud and all your inventory of VMs, data center clusters – everything will show up on the Clumio.com page that you’re on,” said Kumar. “You then create the policies you need for backing up your data, add VMs and clusters to it – and that’s it. Within 15 minutes, you’re up and running and you don’t have to worry about any complex software installation or hardware deployment and so on. You can enjoy the end-to-end SaaS service that we’re delivering to you.”

How Do You Pay For It?

Customers pay for Clumio’s SaaS service based on the number of VMs protected. Clients can create one policy to apply to VMs on-premise and in the cloud.

“It’s very predicable in terms of the cost structure where you don’t even need to have an AWS account, it’s a true SaaS experience,” said Kumar. “Also you’re paying on a per VM, per-year basis. So you’re not really worrying about the underlying infrastructure.”

What’s The Endgame?

Clumio has major growth plans for the future that include adding other public cloud platforms, launching new features and expanding globally.

“We’re just scratching the surface in terms of building a long-term platform and delivering more services on top of this platform at scale globally. We’ve done a great job in building the foundation of the platform,” said Kumar.

The startup plans to incorporate Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure to Clumio. “Today it runs on AWS in the U.S.,” said Kumar. “Our long-term plan, in addition to expanding the use cases and expanding across regions in AWS around the globe, is to deliver this across multiple clouds. That’s how we have built the platform to be a truly multi-cloud platform.”

Clumio said it is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the increasing demand for SaaS, with global revenues expected to increase from $80 billion in 2018 to more than $140 billion by 2022. According to IDC, the Data Protection as a Service market, which includes spending on backup and disaster recovery cloud services, will grow to over $10 billion by 2022.

When asked where he sees Clumio in two years, Kumar said “much bigger.”

“In two years from now, the hope is to be much bigger with many more customers and a much bigger reach. I fundamentally believe for the right enterprise companies, there’s no real finish line and there’s a huge market and there’s a lot to disrupt and innovate,” he said. “We hope that we’ll barley be scratching the surface over the next two to three years to go and really build an innovative company.”