Disaster recovery startup Datos IO launches with $15.25M

Datos IO, a startup that builds software intended to back up data stored in distributed applications and databases, is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing $15.25 million in venture capital funding.

The startup has developed disaster recovery software that lets companies go back to previous versions of the NoSQL database distributed by Cassandra. The idea is to provide similar tooling for other modern scale-out databases, such as MongoDB. The tools, including open-source “application listeners” that monitor for changes, will become available in the first quarter of next year.

Traditional disaster recovery systems aren’t a good fit for increasingly popular databases that span multiple servers, hence the need for something new, said cofounder and chief executive Tarun Thakur, who spent three years working on EMC’s Data Domain disaster recovery hardware product. Earlier he was at IBM Research’s Almaden lab in Silicon Valley. Company-wide deployments of Cassandra and other distributed systems could become far more common once there are disaster recovery tools that can handle them, Thakur said.

And the startup’s investors are convinced of the need for something like this.

“Billion-dollar companies were created in a similar space, but around structured and relational databases,” True Ventures partner Puneet Agarwal told VentureBeat in an interview. “We think the opportunity is even bigger in the non-relational world.”

Without question, several of the startups behind NoSQL databases and distributions of the Hadoop open-source big data software have succeeded in raising large amounts of venture capital funding. Analytics tools built for Hadoop have been gaining momentum, too. Now it’s possible that a new related market is emerging.

There are at least a few other startups interested in the area of disaster-recovery software for modern technologies. Those include Talena, which recently raised $12 million with backing from Intel Capital and others, and Trilio Data, which is in EMC’s backyard in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Longstanding companies in the backup market, such as Veritas, may well choose to pursue the area if these startups gain traction.

“They are very boring sectors, but people pay a lot of money for that, Thakur told VentureBeat.

So far, Datos IO has completed seven proof-of-concept projects with companies, two of which are now paying, Thakur said.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the new round in Datos IO. True Ventures, Ashmeet Sidana, Pat Gallagher, and Amarjit Gill also participated.

Datos IO started last year and is based in San Jose. The startup employs around 23 people.