Rewind Closes $65M Funding For App-Specific Data Protection

‘Think about how pervasive SaaS is, and how fast it is growing. We are focused on the popular SaaS apps, and work with six so far. Our goal is to back up all the popular SaaS apps. We think it’s reachable,’ says Rewind CEO Mike Potter. ‘We’ve done six platforms so far, and we’ve learned a lot from these six, all of which are different. We think we have the right team and the right technology to do them all.’

Rewind, which develops data protection technology targeting popular SaaS platforms, said on Wednesday it has raised $65 million in a Series B round aimed at expanding its capabilities to cover additional platforms and funding new acquisitions.

With that new round of funding, Rewind has now raised just over $80 million to date, said Mike Potter (pictured), CEO and co-founder of the Ottawa-based company.

Rewind focuses on cloud-to-cloud backups for major SaaS applications such as BigCommerce, GitHub, QuickBooks Online, Shopify, Shopify Plus, and Trello, Potter told CRN. Protection of Zendesk environments is coming soon, he said.

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Rewind is looking at a huge potential market, and one that is vastly underserved, Potter said.

“Think about how pervasive SaaS is, and how fast it is growing,” he said. “We are focused on the popular SaaS apps, and work with six so far. Our goal is to back up all the popular SaaS apps. We think it’s reachable. We’ve done six platforms so far, and we’ve learned a lot from these six, all of which are different. We think we have the right team and the right technology to do them all.”

This is a market which is typically handled on a very small scale, often by a single person developing an application-specific backup technology, Potter said.

“It’s fairly common for people to develop small apps to back up specific applications,” he said. “We have competitors doing backups of applications like QuickBooks Online and Shopify.”

Part of the new funding will go towards future acquisitions, Potter said. In February, Rewind acquired BackHub, a small developer of data protection software for the GitHub platform, according to Potter.

“We’ll be looking to acquire companies working on backup technology in platforms we are interested in adding to our portfolio,” he said.

The latest round of funding includes one strategic investor, Australia-based software developer tool maker Atlassian. Potter said Rewind already backs up data from Trello, the developer of collaboration tools owned by Atlassian, and that the company is now working on protecting data in other Atlassian applications.

Rewind currently has more than 22,000 customers with more than 40,000 accounts in total, Potter said. The company has some channel partners working with the company in certain platforms like Shopify that have their own channel programs, he said.

“The apps we back up aren’t normally targeted by MSPs, but we do get requests from the channel from companies working with QuickBooks Online and GitHub,” he said. “We’re working on programs to work with MSPs.”