Data protection and recovery company ramps up Asia presence with $70m series E

Photo credit: Zerto are trying to prevent. The US/Israeli startup announced today it has raised US$20 million in an investment led by US venture capital firm CRV. This latest funding is in addition to the US$50 million series E the company raised in January, led by US late-stage venture capital firm IVP.

The funding will be used for expanding Zerto’s presence worldwide and improving its products.

Zerto offers protection, recovery, and migration of data, whether in online servers or within data centers. Its flagship product is Zerto Virtual Replication. It helps companies secure their data in a system that can use both private storage and public servers like Amazon Web Services (AWS). It also provides disaster recovery services for cloud service providers, helping them get back client data stored online in cases of, well, disaster.

The series E round was joined by new investor ClalTech, the Israeli entity for US holding company Access Industries, and existing investors including 83North, Battery Ventures, Harmony Partners, RTP Ventures, and US Venture Partners.

Zerto has been building its board of directors with every investment that’s gone into the company so far, president Paul Zeiter tells Tech in Asia. Investor Mark Leslie sits on the board, and during the series E it was announced that IVP general partner Sandy Miller would join the board as an observer. “They bring experience and guidance to the company and that allows us a very positive environment,” Paul says.

The startup’s customers range from small- and medium-sized enterprises to larger companies in financial services, healthcare, insurance, legal, and education. Fujitsu, Premier Healthcare, and shipping company Eukor are some of them.

A regional hub in Singapore

The funding will be used for expanding Zerto’s presence worldwide and improving its products. The company is opening a Singapore office to be able to better serve the Asia-Pacific region, including its customers in China, Japan, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand.

Zerto chose Singapore to serve as its Asia-Pacific hub because of the talent in sales, marketing, engineering, and support services that’s available in the city-state. The country’s multicultural background and travel hub status in the region are extra incentives.

Zerto president Paul Zeiter. Photo credit: Zerto.

The company has been growing 100 percent in terms of sales and revenue every year for the past four years, Paul says, although he doesn’t give specific numbers. Its customer base has been growing at a slightly lower rate, as existing customers increase their use of Zerto’s services. “As we gain customers, there’s organic growth within those same ones,” Paul explains.

Zerto’s competitive advantage is in the way it provides a data protection and recovery infrastructure that spans multiple systems, and in the speed with which it can respond in the event of an outage.

“We compete in a space that’s pretty unique in terms of objectives,” Paul says. Those objectives are RPO and RTO. The first, Recovery Point Objective, is the amount of time until recovery in which data can be lost. The second, Recovery Time Objective, is the amount of time it takes for service to resume. Paul says Zerto can achieve one within seconds and the other within minutes.

“Other companies offer backup as a service – the difference is, you’re looking at hours and even days to bring that data back up,” he says.