By IANS,
Bangalore: Data protection and disaster recovery products’ firm Druva Software raised $5 million (Rs.22.5 crore) venture fund from Sequoia Capital and Indian Angel Network (IAN), the company said Tuesday.
The Pune-based start-up plans to use the first round of venture fund to expand its operations in new geographies, besides the US and Europe, where it has a considerable presence, the three-year-old company said in a statement here.
Though the exact amount invested by each of the two venture capital firms has not been disclosed, company sources said Sequoia’s investment was more for a higher equity stake, which is unspecified.
“IAN has earlier invested as an angel investor for a minority stake in the company and now participated in the series ‘A’ round of funding with Sequoia,” a company official told IANS.
The medium-to-long term investment qualifies Sequoia to join Druva’s board as a director.
With two-award winning software products – Druva inSync for laptops in an enterprise environment and Druva Phoenix for remote servers, the company has customers in about 20 countries.
The start-up’s research and development (R&D) team, which has domain expertise in data storage products, incorporated the next generation data de-duplication technologies to provide optimised data protection across the enterprise.
“Our innovative approach towards data de-duplication for corporate offices and remote users allows better storage and provides significant savings in time and bandwidth requirements,” Druva chief executive Jaspreet Singh said.
Sequoia managing director Shailendra Singh said the venture fund was investing in a profitable firm, which posted about 300 percent sales growth last fiscal (2009-10) and was preferred by clients over established vendors in countries where Dhruva had no presence yet.
“Druva’s differentiated products and internet-based sales model makes it a disruptive business opportunity. We are committing our resources to help the start-up scale quickly. We hope its success will inspire other entrepreneurs to build world-class software products in India,” Shailendra Singh noted.
The US-based Sequoia manages funds capitalised at $1.8 billion and invests across venture, growth and late stage opportunities in India.