Commvault acquires data backup provider Clumio

It must be M&A season.

Commvault, a publicly traded data protection and management software company, announced Tuesday that it intends to acquire data backup and recovery provider Clumio for an undisclosed sum.

The deal is expected to close in early October. Commvault says it’s not material to its earnings and that it’ll be funded with cash on hand.

Clumio, headquartered in Santa Clara, was founded in 2017 by Poojan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil, and Woon Ho Jung. It largely serves to protect AWS workloads, though it introduced support for Microsoft 365 back in 2020. 

As of February, Clumio was notching double-digit millions of dollars for annual recurring revenue — up 400% from 2022 to 2023 — and acquiring customers like Atlassian, Duolingo, and LexisNexis. The firm raised $261 million in venture capital from investors including Index Ventures, NewView Capital, and Sutter Hill Ventures prior to Tuesday’s exit.

“At Clumio, our vision was to build a platform that could scale quickly to protect the world’s largest and most complex data sets,” Kumar, who was recently appointed Clumio’s chairman after stepping down as CEO in June, said in a statement. “Joining hands with Commvault allows us to get our cloud-native offerings to AWS customers on a global scale.”

Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani sees Clumio complementing Commvault’s existing “cyber resilience” tools for software built on AWS. Now, he says, Commvault can offer enterprises expanded choice to protect and recover their data and cloud-native apps.

AWS-dependent or no, the data backup and recovery market is massive, which no doubt factored into Commvault’s M&A decision. According to market analytics firm KBV Research, the global data backup and recovery sector was worth $12.9 billion in 2023, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.9% from 2017 to last year.

Businesses face increasing threats related to ransomware. There’s also the issue of data center disasters like the fire that hit France’s OVH in 2021, leading to significant data loss. In some countries, data management-related regulations like the EU AI Act are coming into force, many with strict data retention and provenance stipulations.

“In the event of an outage or cyberattack, rapidly getting back to business is paramount to our customers,” Mirchandani said in a press release. “Combining Commvault’s industry-leading cyber resilience capabilities with Clumio’s exceptional talent and technology advances our recovery offerings, strengthens our platform, and reinforces our position as a leading software-as-a-service provider for cyber resilience.”

The news comes on the heels of Commvault’s purchase of cloud app resilience company Appranix earlier this year and after Commvault’s expectation-beating Q1 results.

Commvault, originally formed in 1988 as a development group in Bell Labs focused on data management, backup, and recovery, was designated a business unit of AT&T and spun off as its own enterprise in the late ’90s. Commvault went public in 2006, at which point it moved its corporate headquarters from Oceanport to Tinton Falls, New Jersey.

Commvault’s other acquisitions to date include software-defined storage startup Hedvig and cybersecurity company TrapX.