Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Druva, a Data Protection Platform, Lands $25 Million Series C

You hear a lot these days about the problems companies have keeping track of their data as they shift toward providing access to data in a more mobile and flexible way. It wasn’t so long ago that if you backed up the files on company-issued notebooks, you pretty much had it licked. But now you have to think about personal devices like tablets and smartphones that connect over pretty much whatever networks they have handy, and which can get lost or stolen. Keeping track of who has access to what confidential files gets complicated pretty quick.

Druva, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup, has been aiming to make it easier. Its InSync suite is a platform that is intended to safeguard corporate assets by linking the backup of all those files that live on the endpoint — a PC, a tablet, a smartphone — to file-sharing, encryption, and creating an audit trail for governance and forensics purposes.

The result is that employees end up with all the freedom of file-sharing and collaboration that they might want in their day-to-day work lives, while the IT department gets all the security and control features that satisfy its needs. If someone loses a phone, the IT folks can wipe the sensitive data and block whoever has it from accessing company files.

The company said today that it has landed a $25 million Series C round of venture capital funding, with investments from Sequoia Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, both of which have invested before, and a new investment from Tenaya Capital. The round brings its total capital raised to $42 million. Tom Banahan, managing director of Tenaya Capital, is joining Druva’s board as part of the deal.

CEO Jaspreet Singh told me yesterday that the company is now protecting more than 1.7 million endpoints — that would be PCs, tablets and smartphones — for about 2,100 customers in 76 countries, and expects to grow to about 200 employees by the end of the year.

Its customers include Fusion-io, the well-known data storage company; perfume retailer Sephora; NASA, the U.S. space agency; luxury luggage maker Louis Vuitton; and consulting firm PWC.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald