Cloud backup and recovery company HYCU raises $87.5M

HYCU, a company developing data backup and recovery solutions for enterprises, today announced that it closed a $87.5 million series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. With the introduction of HYCU Protégé, a disaster recovery solution for enterprise apps, HYCU says it will use the funding to expand and grow its app, public cloud, and software-as-a-service-based innovations as well as hire aggressively in Boston and North America to meet growth goals.

There are few catastrophes more disruptive to an enterprise than data loss, and the causes are unfortunately myriad. In a recent survey of IT professionals, about a third pegged the blame on hardware or system failure, while 29% said their companies lost data because of human error or ransomware. It’s estimated that upwards of 93% of organizations that lose servers for 10 days or more during a disaster filed for bankruptcy within the next 12 months, with 43% never reopening. Those statistics are more alarming in light of high-profile outages like that of OVHCloud earlier this month, which took down 3.6 million websites ranging from government agencies to financial institutions to computer gaming companies.

Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, HYCU, which was founded in 2018, offers modular data management services designed to simplify multi-cloud data migration, disaster recovery, and data protection management. It aims to bring software-as-a-service-based data backup to both on-premises and cloud-native environments, in part via support for platforms including VMware, Amazon Web Services, Nutanix, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

“HYCU believes in leveraging the power of AI and making it transparent for the user. The way it manifests for the end user is in terms of what we call Intelligent Simplicity,” CEO Simon Taylor explained to VentureBeat via email. “For example, unlike a number of other solutions, with HYCU, our customer does not have to tell the software where to store the backups; it automatically matches the customer’s service-level agreement with the capabilities of the network and backup targets to find the right place. This approach reduces effort and keeps cost at the optimal level.”

According to Gartner, data-driven downtime costs the average company $300,000 per hour — or $5,600 every minute. That’s perhaps why Markets and Markets predicts that the data and backup recovery market will be worth well over $11 billion by 2022.

HYCU competes to a degree with San Francisco-based Rubrik, which has raised $553 million in venture capital to date for its live data access and recovery offerings, and Cohesity, which bills itself as the industry’s first hyperconverged secondary storage for backup, development, file services, and analytics. That’s not to mention data recovery juggernaut Veeam, which now serves 80% of the Fortune 500 and 58% of the Global 5000; Acronis, which raised $147 million in September for its suite of data backup, protection, and restoration tools; and cloud data backup and recovery company Clumio.

“Many use cases for our customers center around being able to backup and recover with specific on-premises environments like Nutanix and VMware. Or, they may need a solution they can easily run and deploy from a specific cloud platform like Google Cloud or Azure Cloud,” Taylor said. “For Nutanix environments in particular we have a long-established and rich pedigree of support for their solutions.”

HYCU, which has over 200 employees, claims to have over 2,000 customers worldwide. ACrew Capital also participated in the company’s latest funding round.