Rubrik gets $10M to sell hardware that can replace old-school backup software

Investors have given $10 million to storage startup Rubrik, which has hired some seriously accomplished engineers from Google, Facebook, and other companies to develop and sell data center hardware that can do the job of several types of storage software that large companies have long relied on.

In addition to announcing its new funding today, Rubrik is announcing the kickoff of its early access program, to give more companies an opportunity to try out its system. The two-rack-unit box can take care of the work of backup, deduplication, compression, and version management. And once it’s all ready to go somewhere else, the data can be offloaded to a public cloud like Amazon Web Services.

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As such, Rubrik will compete with EMC; Veritas, the company that’s slated to spin out of Symantec next month; Veeam; and CommVault.

It’s hardly trendy technology, as it’s going to provide primary storage for data. It’s the “backwater of enterprise,” to use the words of Bipul Sinha, a cofounder and the chief executive of Rubrik. And that’s exciting to Sinha, who was previously a founding investor of Nutanix, PernixData, and Numerify.

Rubrik’s dependence on hardware is interesting. Generally speaking, software has been gradually taking on capabilities that were previously only available to big companies through expensive, purpose-built hardware. But Rubrik’s approach goes in the opposite direction.

Sinha is not worried. He thinks Rubrik can make a dent by being quick and easy to install. He says that the system can be up and running in 15 and minutes, and that companies can scale it out by adding more and more Rubrik boxes. And besides that, the total cost of ownership for a Rubrik-powered backup system will be lower than alternatives, Sinha said.

If nothing else, the startup is worth following because its team includes so many heavyweights. Among others, Rubrik employs Arvind Jain, a former Google distinguished engineer who worked on Google’s web crawling and indexing technology; Soham Mazumdar, who is credited as architect of Google’s system for indexing the web on disk drives instead of memory; and Arvind Nithrakashyap, a cofounder of Oracle’s Exadata data warehousing system.

Rubrik claims to have more than 10 customers now.

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the new round in Rubrik. Microsoft chairman John W. Thompson, ServiceNow chief executive Frank Slootman, and Veritas chief executive Mark Leslie also participated.