Datto, a backup and disaster recovery service from Norwalk, Connecticut, purchased cloud to cloud backup service Backupify today. It was a move designed to give Datto a more complete product portfolio.
Terms were not available, but Backupify co-founder and CEO Rob May told TechCrunch that his investors were more than satisfied. “It was a lot more than we raised,” he said.
Backupify, which was founded in 2008 in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a way to back up your cloud services, has raised $19.5M to-date. The idea of a backup service for your cloud services may seem redundant. After all, they are supposed to take care of that for you. But as May pointed out to me in a conversation last spring, it’s not about protecting against data loss from the services themselves, so much as end user error. If someone deletes a key file from a cloud service accidentally or on purpose, and there is no backup, that’s a problem. Backupify solves that issue.
As for Datto, it works with companies to get them back up quickly in the event of an outage. When a disaster happens, the company claims it can get a virtualized instance of a system running in seconds. Datto CEO and founder Austin McChord says the company’s watershed moment was Hurricane Sandy when they were able to keep clients working, even when the local infrastructure had been destroyed or was under water.
McChord told TechCrunch he liked the fact that Backupify filled a gap in his company’s product portfolio. Now, he said they can protect data wherever it lives, whether that’s a private data center or the cloud. Plus he explained that Backupify clients tend to be in the enterprise, and up until now Datto’s have been mostly SMBs. Buying Backupify gives him access to those larger, more lucrative customers.
May said that idea for a sale began to take root last summer when he met McChord for dinner. At that point, he said selling the company was the furthest thing from his mind, but the more they talked over the coming weeks, the better the idea sounded. He said the two of them shared a similar vision for backup and where they wanted to go with it, and he came to believe they could get there together much faster.
May was also impressed with Datto’s infrastructure. Datto runs two data centers in the US and three overseas and has 100 petabytes of data under its care. Backupify is currently running on Amazon Web Services, but the plan is to move the three petabytes of Backupify data to the Datto data centers in the coming months.
May seemed genuinely excited about the deal, saying that, up until now there has been no company that can deal with the fragmented backup needs of a modern organization and cover that data wherever it lives. He said the combined companies should be able to handle that, and he seemed to be looking forward to working as part of a larger company with a shared vision.
McChord said that the companies will continue to operate separately and the two sets of offices will remain open with the goal of building a total protection platform.
