Billion Dollar Unicorns: Rubrik Gears Up To Go Public
A Gartner report published last year estimates the backup and recovery software market as the largest segment of the overall storage software market. The backup and recovery software market was estimated to be a $5.7 billion industry in 2015, recording a growth of 5.5% over the year. Palo Alto-based Rubrik is a Billion Dollar Unicorn club member in the industry.
Rubrik’s Offerings
Rubrik was founded in 2014 by Arvind Nithrakashyap, Soham Mazumdar, Bipul Sinha and Arvind Jain. The idea for Rubrik came to Bipul, who was the investment partner at venture capital company Lightspeed. He was looking for a market opportunity to set up a business of his own. He evaluated the backup and recovery market and realized that the market hadn’t seen a lot of innovation in nearly a decade. He also realized that the public cloud needed a solution for its backup and recovery, and there lay an opportunity in integrating the two and defining a new standard. He then reached out to his friends who got together to build onto the idea.
Today Rubrik offers a Cloud Data Management platform that delivers data protection, search, analytics, and copy data management to hybrid cloud enterprises. It unifies backup, instant recovery, replication, search, analytics, archival, compliance, and copy data management in one fabric across the data center and cloud. Rubrik focuses on organizations that use apps and data that are stored across hybrid environments. Its platform can retrieve data from both the cloud or on-premise with equal speed, while keeping it indexed. Rubrik believes that its offering is the first converged solution for data backups that successfully integrates the required processes in a single appliance. Unlike competitors like Symantec and EMC, Rubrik does not expect its customers to buy backup hardware, access to a database and media servers. Instead, it combines all the requirements into a single appliance that can be connected to the customer’s existing infrastructure directly.
Rubrik’s product has been well liked by the market. Earlier this year, it was ranked as a visionary in the magic quadrant for data center backup and recovery by Gartner.
Rubrik is not alone in the market though. It has a big list of competitors including established names like Symantec and IBM. Additionally, there are other Unicorn start-ups like Druva and Actifio. Actifio had earned revenues of $40 million in 2014 and was valued at $1.1 billion in a funding round held in 2014. India’s SaaS offering of Druva is also doing remarkably well. With revenues expected to be nearly $150 million, Druva could become India’s first legitimate SaaS product Unicorn. Rubrik claims that its ability to scale its appliance rapidly by allowing companies to drop more Rubrik appliances into their data center while its software automatically tethers the appliances together, makes it stand out in the crowd.
Rubrik’s Financials
Rubrik remains privately held and does not disclose its financials. Reports suggest that Rubrik was operating at a revenue run rate of $100 million by the start of the year. It has been venture funded so far with $292 million from investors including Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Its last round of funding was held in April this year when it raised $180 million at a valuation of $1.3 billion. An earlier round held in August last year had valued the company at $600 million. Many believe that the company is now gearing up to go public.
Sramana Mitra is the founder of One Million by One Million (1M/1M), a global virtual incubator that aims to help one million entrepreneurs ...
more