This startup secures data for NASA, Fujitsu, Deloitte. Here’s how it got there

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From NASA, Louis Vuitton, and Berkeley University in the West to Fujitsu, Petronas, and the National University of Singapore in the East, over 3,000 organizations worldwide use an Indian startup to back up and secure their data, not EMC, Symantec, or some other Fortune 500 biggie providing security software. Why’s that?

The Indian startup in question, Druva, had a modest beginning in Pune, near Mumbai, eight years ago. Three engineers of Veritas Software, which merged with Symantec, quit and launched their own data security firm. From there it went global and is now headquartered in California.

A couple of years ago it had a US$25 million series D funding round, less than a year after a series C of the same amount, to become the industry’s fastest-growing cloud-based data protection provider. Gartner ranked Druva highest among enterprise endpoint backup solutions three times, the latest being last year.

See: Corporate data is exploding. That’s good news for Druva.

Continuous evolution is the secret sauce

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CEO and co-founder Jaspreet Singh attributes Druva’s success to a series of calculated bets that paid off. But he’s not resting on his laurels. “You have to continuously evolve. If not, you will get stuck,” he tells Tech in Asia in the course of a chat during a recent visit to Bangalore from Mountain View, California, where he’s now based.

An early bet was to focus on endpoint data protection. Today nearly half of all corporate data resides outside enterprise data centers. For example, a lot of the data is on various devices of its employees on the move.

The need to backup and encrypt sensitive enterprise data on the laptops and smartphones of employees, to prevent disruption or misuse in case the devices get lost or fall into the wrong hands, seems obvious now. But in 2008, most of the security software being sold was meant for company data centers. That’s where Druva filled a gap.

“A lot of companies were investing into mobility and they were worried about the security of the data their team was carrying around. That is how we took off,” recalls Jaspreet.

See: 5 top investors in Indian SaaS startups – and their best bets

A shift to the cloud

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Zero to one with data governance

The moonshot

Back to earth