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As organizations move their operations to the cloud, they face more security incidents, a result of challenges related to transitions from on-premises to remote data and infrastructure management. According to a recent survey80% of businesses experienced at least one cloud security issue in 2022, while 27% suffered a breach with a public cloud provider – up 10% from 2021.
This has led to increased interest in startups developing tools to manage and secure data stored in the cloud at scale. By According to Grand View Research, the enterprise data management market is expected to grow by 12.1% between 2022, when it was worth $89.34 billion, and 2030.
Alción fits the bill. Its platform, which it describes as “backup as a service,” provides a range of disaster recovery, anti-ransomware and anti-malware, and compliance tools for businesses whose workloads are primarily based on the cloud in Microsoft 365.
Alcion today closed a $21 million Series A fundraising round led by Veeam, the IT company owned by Insight Partners. This is a curious investment, considering that Veeam competes with Alcion in the areas of data backup/restore and disaster recovery (unless investing in the precursor to an acquisition). But Alcion CEO Niraj Tolia called it simply a vote of confidence in Alcion’s growth strategy.
“Alcion is a company built on the pillars of a product-first and community-driven approach, with a strong technical foundation in a modern, AI-driven architecture designed for enterprise workloads and environments. modern threats,” Tolia said. “It solves data management challenges faced by businesses storing data in the cloud, including disaster recovery, ransomware and malware threats, and compliance. »
Tolia founded Alcion in 2022 with Vaibhav Kamra, a serial entrepreneur and longtime business partner. Previously, the two launched Kasten, a Kubernetes backup company acquired by Veeam in 2020 (hence the Alcion relationship, one presumes), and led product development and engineering at the storage startup Maginacics.
“Simply adding security features to existing products does not provide the value customers are looking for,” Tolia said. “Security must be an integral part of (system) design and implementation for efficiency, speed and cost-effectiveness… Alcion was therefore designed, from the ground up, to protect the world’s data against malicious threats and accidents, whether ransomware. or malware.
Alcion focuses on managing and securing data stored in third-party Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications in Microsoft 365, including applications such as Microsoft Teams. The platform leverages AI models to detect ransomware at the file and user level, allowing Alcion to identify targeted attacks seemingly more effectively than services that rely on static rules, Tolia says.
Alcion backs up data and provides alerts about potential malware via email and the company’s web dashboard. Additionally, Alcion attempts to proactively help administrators ensure that data remains protected, by providing recommendations based on past data activity and a “compliance score” that takes into account various security configurations and l The status (i.e. completeness) of data backups.
“Alcion integrates with other parts of the customer’s security ecosystem,” Tolia said, “and can perform proactive backups in response to threats that emerge in other parts of the customer’s infrastructure (e.g. (example, ransomware attacks on laptops).”
It is worth highlighting that a large number of companies offer solutions, including incumbents, to safeguard and secure corporate data. Cyera, for example, offers a set of tools to provide businesses with greater visibility into their sensitive data; it raised $100 million in June. Rubrik recently acquired Laminara specialist in securing data running and stored on popular public cloud platforms.
But Tolia maintains that Alcion is sufficiently differentiated.
“Given our per-seat pricing with unlimited storage and free Microsoft SharePoint backups, focus on improving security and using AI to improve security and reduce manual work for our users, we benefit from a climate where ransomware is a priority, but budgets are tight,” he said.
Maybe he’s right. While Tolia was reluctant to give even rough estimates of the size of Alcion’s customer base, much less annual recurring revenue, he revealed that “a large number” of customers – as vague as that may sound – pay for the startup’s tools and services, which are actively used by thousands of individual users.
The money raised in this latest fundraising round, which brings Alcion’s total to $29 million, will be dedicated to Alcion’s commercialization efforts and the development of its product and engineering teams. The San Francisco-based company plans to increase its workforce, which currently stands at 21 people, to 30 people or more by the end of the year.
“It was a good time to increase because of the demand we are seeing and want to double,” Tolia said. “We will add more regions to serve our customers closer to where they are, expand the depth of our current product portfolio, add new data protection products for other SaaS services and grow sales and marketing.
