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Backup biz Acronis ascends to unicorndom after $147m splurge led by Goldman Sachs

Cash for acquisitions, new hires and data centre expansion

Goldman Sachs has led a $147m funding round in Acronis which values the data recovery and protection vendor at more than a billion dollars – unicorn status.

Acronis will use the money to buy businesses, hire more engineers, fund data centre expansion and increase public-sector revenues in North America.

Co-founder, chairman and CEO Serguei Beloussov said in a statement confirming the capital injection that the business grew revenue by a fifth in 2018 and is forecasting top-line expansion of 30 per cent this year.

Those percentages are largely meaningless because, as a private organisation, Acronis does not reveal its actual revenues.

Founded in 2003, Acronis has headquarters in Singapore and Switzerland, and employs more than 1,400 people. The company claims to have more than 500,000 business customers, five million consumer customers, and 50,000 suited channel and service provider pals in 150 countries.

The backup world is embracing cyber protection and cloud-based services. As customers adopt the public cloud, there is an opportunity for new backup providers to jump in and offer cloud-based services that piggyback on existing on-premises backup arrangements.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos

Oh snap: AWS has only gone and brought out its own Backup

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Of course, the cloud vendors are also spotting this movement and in January Amazon squeezed out its own backup service for AWS apps and data. AWS punters will also be able to back up on-premises application data via the AWS Backup integration with its own Storage Gateway.

Acronis's competitor Veeam took in $500m in January this year. Rubrik and Cohesity secured funding to the tune of $552m and $410m respectively. Druva had a $130m round this year, taking total funding to $328m and also gaining unicorn status. And startup Clumio entered the cloud backup-as-a-service space with $51m in funding in August. ®

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