Silicon Valley-headquartered cloud backup and data protection firm Druva Inc, which counts Sequoia Capital India and Nexus Venture Partners as investors, has raised fresh funding of $130 million (around Rs 902.5 crore at the current exchange rate) to join the so-called unicorn club of technology startups valued above $1 billion.
The funding round is being led by US-based investment firm Viking Global Investors, Druva in a statement. Founded in 1999, Viking Global Investors manages around $28 billion of capital for investors, according to its website. It has offices in Greenwich, New York, Hong Kong, London and San Francisco.
Neuberger Berman and Atreides Capital are the two other new investors taking part in this round while existing investors including Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital and Nexus have also contributed.
“Today’s funding will help Druva to power data protection for the cloud era, and accelerate our momentum to better serve the needs of enterprise customers," said Jaspreet Singh, Druva’s chief executive officer.
Separately, Singh told TechCrunch that the round takes the company’s valuation “well past the $1 billion mark”.
Druva was founded in Pune by Singh, an Indian Institute of Technology-Guwahati graduate, along with Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman back in 2008.
The company delivers data protection and management for the cloud. Druva’s cloud platform is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It claims to help customers reduce costs by up to 50% by freeing them from unnecessary hardware, capacity planning, and software management. Druva has more than 4,000 enterprise customers including Flex, Hitachi, Live Nation, Marriott, and Pfizer.
Druva had previously raised $80 million in a funding round led by Riverwood Capital in 2017.
In September 2016, the company had raised $51 million led by Sequoia Capital India. The company had received $25 million in its Series D round in 2014 and an equal amount in Series C funding the year before. In 2011, it secured $12 million in its Series B round of funding.
Druva joins logistics-technology firm Delhivery Pvt. Ltd in joining India’s unicorn club this year. Delhivery had in March raised $395 million (around Rs 2,784 crore) in a Series F funding round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.
The respective valuations of fantasy sport platform Dream11 and payment solutions firm BillDesk have also crossed the $1-billion mark this year.
According to a NASSCOM-Zinnov report, as many as eight Indian startups entered the unicorn club in 2018 -- the highest ever. They included edtech startup Byju's food delivery firm Swiggy, budget hotel aggregator OYO, cloud-based business software firm Freshworks, e-commerce venture Paytm Mall and online insurance platform PolicyBazaar.
*An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that logistics-technology startup BlackBuck's valuation had crossed $1 billion. The error is regretted.
