Rewind picks up $15 million to protect data in SaaS applications

Rewind today revealed it has received $15 million in additional funding to drive the adoption of a platform for the backup and recovery of data stored in software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. The funds were part of a A series round led by Inovia Capital. Rewind has primarily focused its efforts on providing backup and capabilities for cloud services that are not addressed by rivals, Rewind CEO Mike Potter said in an interview.

The company claims to have protected the data of more than 80,000 organizations worldwide, including Badgley Mischka, Charmin, Magnolia, Pampers, and Paul Mitchel. Other participants in the funding round included Ridge Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.

While most providers of backup-as-a-service platforms are focused on broadly deployed SaaS applications like Microsoft Office 365, Rewind has gained traction by focusing on platforms that are not as widely used, Potter said. That strategy has paid off during the COVID-19 pandemic, Potter added.

For example, less than 1% of all the Quickbook accounts managed by Intuit are currently backed up, Potter said. Other SaaS platforms Rewind supports include BigCommerce and Shopify. In total, Rewind claims it currently backs up over 33 billion data points globally via datacenters distributed around the world.

In addition to expanding the number of platforms it supports, the company will also use the capital infusion to expand its sales, marketing, and customer service teams, Potter said. Rewind currently has 65 employees.

While providers of SaaS platforms will restore their platforms in the event of a catastrophic failure, it’s up to the end user and the IT teams that support them to secure data at the individual account level. The biggest data protection issue most organizations are trying to mitigate is when a malicious insider starts deleting critical data at the account level within a SaaS application, Potter said.

Eventually, Rewind will support the entire portfolio of SaaS applications that are most widely used today, he added. “The opportunity we see is to back up the entire cloud,” he said.

In the meantime, the rate at which organizations are adopting smaller SaaS platforms to address a specific application requirement continues to grow, Potter noted.

Competition between a large number of existing data protection platforms is already fierce, but Potter said he doesn’t expect to see much in the way of consolidation among vendors in the category anytime soon. He said ready access to investor capital is increasing the valuation of startups in the category to the point that they are becoming prohibitively expensive to acquire.

At the same time, the amount of data that needs to be protected continues to exponentially increase inside and outside of the cloud, making it possible for data protection platform providers to drive substantial revenue growth, Potter said. Founded in 2015, Rewind claims to have seen revenue grow 1,113% over the last three years.

It’s not clear whether that level of revenue growth is sustainable, but the number of organizations without a comprehensive approach to data protection that is applied across multiple cloud platforms consistently is high. In addition, now that more of those platforms are being employed, it’s only a matter of time before compliance officers begin asking for reports that prove the data residing in those platforms is properly protected and secured. In the months following the pandemic, many of those requirements were overlooked in the name of exigent circumstance as employees made use of whatever SaaS application they saw fit to enable their business to continue operating.

However, with the prospect of multiple COVID-19 vaccines being widely distributed by the middle of the year, most organizations will soon return to compliance business as usual.

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