Data Protection Player OwnBackup Closes $15.5 Million Funding Round

OwnBackup, an Israeli-American startup that backs up and restores data generated by Salesforce and other cloud software providers, said Thursday it secured more than $15 million in funding that will go to scaling the business.

The Fort Lee, N.J.-based startup will spend the $15.5 million investment on doubling its workforce across sales, marketing, and a research and development group based in Tel Aviv, said Bridget Piraino, OwnBackup's executive vice president for marketing.

The round was led by Vertex Ventures, a new investor, but all previous investors, including Salesforce Ventures, participated, Piraino said.

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"We're looking to double the size of our team and deepen our relationship with the Salesforce ecosystem," Piraino said of the latest funding.

OwnBackup looks to give Salesforce customers the peace of mind in knowing their corporate data is backed up daily, or even more frequently, in the event they lose or corrupt files.

Salesforce, like other Software-as-a-Service providers, only is responsible for restoring data resulting from an outage on its platform.

Such outages are extremely rare—what happens much more often is the customer accidentally deletes its own data when pushing out code or integrating systems, or is the victim of a cyberattack.

The native recovery tool Salesforce offers for those situations only backs up customer data once a week. In addition to typically being incomplete, the data from that tool is presented in the form of zipped spreadsheets that are difficult to restore from, she said.

OwnBackup's offering works across the Salesforce ecosystem, including third-party applications like Sage and Veeva, as well as other SaaS and PaaS vendors, primarily ServiceNow and Slack. The service is also often used to seed sandboxes for development projects.

OwnBackup worked with the Israeli arm of Vertex Ventures, which will appoint a representative to the company's board of directors.

While most of its sales are direct, the company also relies on Salesforce partners to make inroads with small businesses.

Recent Salesforce acquisitions, especially Mulesoft, a data integration platform , create even more opportunities for the company to scale its revenue, Piraino said.

"With Mulesoft, we can only envision a lot more data from a lot of other sources that needs to be protected," she told CRN.