Backupify Gets Help from Symantec in Series C Funding

Backupify, a 4-year-old startup that provides backup, search and restore services for online services such as Facebook, Google Apps, Salesforce, and Twitter, said July 11 that it has obtained $9 million in Series C funding from existing investors in addition to a new strategic investor, Symantec.

Avalon Ventures, General Catalyst, and Lowercase Capital, which already have put their investment dollars where their mouths are for Backupify, led the funding round. The company did not specify how much was invested by Symantec.

Backupify offers an all-in-one archiving, search and restore platform for online services, such as those highly visible ones noted above. With one account, users get centralized access to all their information along with secure storage, a search function, and data restoration or transfer at a moment’s notice.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based company made some news early last year when it announced that during calendar year 2010, as businesses and consumers moved more of their data to the cloud, they realized the need for an independent backup service like the one they provide. Thus, Backupify’s user base grew from 30,000 early in the year to more than 122,000 by December.

Why the sudden surge of growth and assumed profitability? Well, it turns out that the company’s growth was fueled largely by Backupify’s adding backup support for new cloud services.

Strange but true. Backupify didn’t have such a backup feature for cloud services until 2010, and it has been in business since 2008. Now it seems to have found a real purpose in life; few other storage companies offer backup for cloud services.

Backupify got its start as a way to backup online photos at Flickr, but it soon left behind its consumer strategy for the more lucrative enterprise space. Today, the company has about 170,000 customers — including about 50,000 new ones gained in 2011.