“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo da Vinci
Backup and recovery are massive multi-billion dollar markets ripe for disruption. Customers struggle with the complexity, reliability and costs associated with deploying configurations of antiquated offerings. Imagine being able to bring Apple-like simplicity and delight to this large backwater of IT in every organization? Rubrik has done just that — with a clean-sheet view and an innovative new converged approach.
Rubrik today is announcing their partnership with Greylock, and the general availability of their initial appliance offering. The initial release provides backup and recovery for VMware virtualized server infrastructures, and is seeing strong early demand from channel partners and customers.
Rubrik combines the disparate elements of backup and recovery into a single scale-out platform that can be deployed within minutes, and managed via intuitive policy-based management. It introduces a new architecture by converging backup software and de-duplicated backup storage into a single system. Unlike traditional backup systems, customers can initiate instant recovery directly off Rubrik. Any business can now leverage the same web-scale principles used by Google, Amazon, and Facebook to deploy flexible fault tolerant data backup and recovery. The Rubrik founding team consists of Bipul Sinha (a seasoned VC and entrepreneur from Lightspeed where he was the founding investor and board member at Nutanix, PernixData, Hootsuite); Arvind Jain (Google Distinguished Engineer, founding engineer of Riverbed); Soham Mazumdar (Google Staff Engineer, co-founder of Teragoogle, Google Founder’s Award recipient); and Arvind Nithrakashyap (co-founder of Oracle Exadata). They have attracted an exceptional early team in both product, and sales and marketing. Half the engineering team is from Google or Facebook, 20% of the engineers have PhDs, and the team has filed over 140 patents in the years past.
Bipul and I first met several years ago, when he was investing full-time at Lightspeed. I remember being blown away by the insights he had developed regarding significant enterprise markets including storage, and the important companies he had helped initiate and fund. I was also struck and moved by his personal journey of advancement and perseverance, from growing up poor in a small town in India to Silicon Valley, and his humility, optimism and determination regarding what he could potentially achieve ahead. Needless to say, we took notice when he decided to go back to his entrepreneurial roots and found Rubrik. Ravi Mhatre from Lightspeed led the initial funding round. We were fortunate to receive the first call, when the Rubrik team decided it was time to add to their board of directors and raise additional financing.
Greylock is no stranger to the backup and recovery markets, having invested in and helped build two previous category-defining companies into public companies — Legato and Data Domain. Rubrik joins a distinguished list of enterprise companies at Greylock including AppDynamics, Cloudera, Docker, Palo Alto Networks, Pure Storage and Workday.
Today we are excited to announce our partnership and investment with Rubrik, and look forward to partnering with Bipul, the entire Rubrik team and Lightspeed to help build the next-generation leader in backup and recovery.
