While HYCU says that the actual cash from their new $53 million Series B funding round was not essential to their growth plans, those plans are substantial and will include what they term a new developer-led SaaS service within two months.
Simon Taylor, HYCU’s Founder and CEO
Boston-based HYCU, which started out providing backup specifically for Nutanix and has since developed their backup and recovery technology into a platform with broad multi-cloud coverage, has announced its $53 million Series B funding round led by Acrew Capital. All Series A investors returned, including Bain Capital Ventures. Of particular interest here is the addition of two key participants – Atlassian Ventures and Cisco Investments – who are not coming in as financial investors, but because they have expressed interest in future technology collaborations with HYCU.
“We haven’t fallen prey to the unicorn chasing that’s gone around the industry,” said Simon Taylor, HYCU’s Founder and CEO. “Between our A rounds and our B rounds we raised $140 million in one year. We didn’t just rush off and raise our Series A either. We got to $100 million in sales first. It’s a great way to do it – not giving away the farm on day one.”
Taylor also emphasized that HYCU didn’t really need the funds from the B round, and that there were other reasons for entering into it.
“Our existing investors wanted to raise their stake because we have been successful,” he said. “We had 1000 customers last year and 3100 this year. We are growing an iconic business. Because we are a software-only company, we do not need as much – especially for SaaS – as many other companies. We have also announced two new strategic investors – Atlassian on the DevOps side, and Cisco . The two of them coming in bodes well for the future of the company.”
B round funding initiatives are typically directed at further building out a company’s technology, as well as enhancing their sales and marketing capabilities. Those are the case here, but Taylor also identified a couple other initiatives.
“We are bringing to market a new developer-led SaaS service two months from now,” he said. “We think that this will revolutionize our new SaaS platform which in turn we think will really revolutionize the space. Today, the average enterprise company has 130 data siloes, and we believe this solution will make managing, protecting and recovering data much easier.”
While HYCU has added 165 employees over the past 12 months across go-to-marketing, sales, HR and engineering, the new funding will add to that.
“It will accelerate the hiring of key executives,” Taylor said. “It’s about building a more holistic company that can really support our customers and partners.”
Taylor also indicated where the priority for investment will be going forward.
“As we build out these partnerships, it’s really the alliances and customer success teams we need to invest in,” he stressed. “We need to double down on our alliance investments and channel, to make sure we continue to expand it our percentage there.”
Taylor also pointed to HYCU’s very high NPS score of 91% as something that they need to continue to nurture.
“We need to keep investing more in customer success,” he said. “Our net retention rate is 135%.”
Taylor said that the HYCU Protégé platform remains the simplest way to protect data no matter where it lives.
“Three years ago, when everyone was still building appliances, we said multi-cloud was the issue,” he stated. “The real challenge in a multi-cloud world was how can we provide true equivalency from a datacentre perspective. We called the future of multi-cloud for what it was, and we made HYCYU Protege the ultimate extensible platform. Some said we were crazy, that we should just build a box, but they are designed for one purpose at their heart, not purpose-built for a multi-cloud world.”
