Zerto, which provides protection, recovery and migration of data in cloud and virtualized data centers, revealed on June 21 that it has secured an additional $20 million in Series E1 financing led by Charles River Ventures of Boston.
Existing investors also participated in this latest funding round, which brings Boston-based Zerto’s total VC haul to $130 million over five years.
CEO and founder Ziv Kedem said the financing will be used to maintain the company’s consistent, year-over-year, 100 percent-plus sales growth with further expansion in key international regions and industries, as well as product development.
Zerto Virtual Replication is a hypervisor-based remote replication that stands apart from other disaster recovery packages in the DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service) market, Kedem told eWEEK when the company launched in 2011, because it is purpose-built for Tier 1 applications and is deployed on a virtual infrastructure. Users subscribe to deploy as much of the service as they need, when they need it.
Previously, the most common replication technologies for BC/DR were tied to the physical environment, Kedem said. They were not optimized for virtual environments, leading to many operational and organizational challenges.
DRaaS refers to services that offer business continuity by enabling data backup, recovery and retrieval. It is the process of replicating virtual servers to protect and back up data in the case of man-made or natural disasters.
Key players besides Zerto in this sector include Veeam, CenturyLink’s DataGardens, TwinStrata, Unitrends, Asigra, Infrascale, Cirrity, Intronis, Iland and VelocityCloud. All the usual household-name suspects (IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VMware, Oracle, Dell) also have their own versions of this service.
The $20 million financing is in addition to the $50 million growth financing led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) in January, bringing Zerto’s total Series E financing to $70 million. To date, the company has raised $130 million in financing.
CRV’s existing investors include Access Industries, Claltech, 83North, Battery Ventures, Harmony Partners, IVP, RTP Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners.
In the first quarter of 2016, Zerto expanded its footprint in healthcare and financial services. This growth is attributed to the increased demand for effective, hardware agnostic and cloud agnostic BC/DR software to help maintain compliance in highly regulated industries. The company experienced its fourth consecutive year of over 100 percent sales growth in 2015.
The company said it is preparing to launch mobile capabilities that will allow IT departments to perform a failover (or complete transfer of operations, applications and data from one cloud/data center to another) with the touch of a button.
