Druva, using data protection as a starting point for analytics, picks up $25M

Druva, a startup that protects corporate data on employees’ mobile devices, is expanding into Asia and Europe, thanks to some fresh money.

The startup today announced a $25 million new round.

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Druva offers an endpoint data protection service for enterprises. It protects against data loss by collecting data. with agents on phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices. These agents upload data to Druva’s centralized cloud. When data or devices get lost, data can be restored from Druva’s cloud.

Druva is also exploring what it can do with the data it collects from the mobile devices. One example is its partnership with Recommind, a data-mining company that helps law firms do e-discovery for lawsuits.

“Traditionally, endpoints are not a part of the litigation process,” said Jaspreet Singh, Druva’s chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat. “eDiscovery only focuses on email and file servers, and now, as more and more research is happening on endpoints, they want to find a way to include them in the eDiscovery data-mining process. Druva fills that gap by helping Recommind use its data collection directly extracted from its centralized depository. Druva has extended eDiscovery to endpoints.”

Nowadays, when you are sitting atop a wealth of data, you might find ways to make money out of it — if you’re smart. Twitter used to be a place to broadcast your favorite links. After brands found value in messages on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks, the full firehose of tweets and analytics services on top of them became a big business, and Twitter acquired one of its firehose providers, Gnip. Now Druva could be thinking along similar lines, by viewing data protection as a point of entry for revenue derived from analytics services.

Druva wants to find more partners to work with, Singh said.

Druva’s competitors in the data-protection field include traditional technology sellers such as EMC, HP, and Symantec. However, “using [endpoint] data for relevant data centric problems is the direction we really want to head,” said Singh.

The company’s service runs on the Amazon Web Services public cloud. Singh said 80 percent of Druva’s business is from its public cloud offering. The rest of the service is on companies’ own private clouds.

Druva will use the money to expand into markets in Asia and Europe and to develop a more robust offering of its enterprise products.

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Sequoia Capital led the new round. Nexus Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital also participated.

Druva was launched in 2008. It raised $25 million from the same investors in its last round in October 2013. To date, Druva has raised $67 million.

Druva boasts more than 3,000 customers, including Dell, NASA PricewaterhouseCoopers, SolarCity, and Tesla.

The startup is based in Sunnyvale, Calif. It plans to grow its workforce from 200 to 300 by the end of the year.

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