Veeam. Veeam. Veeeeeeeam. What was that? Oh, just the sound of half a billion bucks hitting backup biz's bucket

+Comment Backup firm Veeam, privately owned and headquartered in Switzerland, has taken on $500m in surprise funding.

The bag of dosh means Veeam won't need to IPO in a hurry. An EMEA spokesman for Veeam told The Reg: “Large companies often look to go public when they reach the scale of Veeam at $1bn revenue (eg, Airbnb, Uber, Sprinklr etc.), all of whom have filed and are purported to be considering an IPO in 2019."

Yep, he name-checked Sprinklr.

The spokesman continued: “However, Veeam has rather chosen to take a sizeable investment to accelerate its growth and market leadership.  It gives the company the benefit of not being distracted by a public offering, and a private currency to do M&A [Veeam's emphasis], and continue to be agile without the constraints of quarterly earnings.”

Apart from an undisclosed minority investment from Insight Venture Partners in 2013, the company, founded in 2006, has had no private equity funding until now.

The $500m funding round was led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), classed as a strategic investor.

The cash is needed, Veeam said, to accelerate the next phase of its growth in the data management game for the public and private cloud. It is primarily known as a data protection supplier, with little activity in the wider data management area.

Veeam sent us a canned remark: “Veeam will leverage Insight Venture Partners’ internal business strategy arm, Insight Onsite, and capital to accelerate its expansion through both organic growth and M&A activities.”

The organic growth will involve new products and expanding Veeam’s geographical footprint. The M&A activity will drive Veeam’s expansion into adjacent markets.

+Reg comment

Veeam doesn’t have a growth problem, on the face of it. It claims to have accumulated 325,000 customers since it was founded in 2006, and to have grown the customer base by 50,000 a year. The cloud data management market is worth about $30bn per year.

Startups like Actifio ($311.5m funding), Cohesity ($410m funding)  and Rubrik ($552m funding), and more mature firms including Commvault and Druva, are providing data management services, such as copy data management and data-as-a-service for test and dev, governance and compliance, and analytics, as customers move to hybrid on-premises and multi-cloud IT.

Acronis is moving into the software-defined data centre area too: it’s almost as if being a (relatively) standalone and primarily on-premises backup supplier is no longer enough.

Veeam has already made a move into public cloud backup, buying N2WS a year ago for its cloud-native enterprise backup and disaster recovery for Amazon Web Services. ®