Boston-based H.I.G. Growth Partners has acquired a majority stake in Rewind, giving the Ottawa company a well-heeled investor with a track record of scaling SaaS companies. Founded in 2015, Rewind specializes in subscription-based software that automatically backs up and recovers data for users of cloud-based platforms such as Shopify and QuickBooks. The company is one […]
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Boston-based H.I.G. Growth Partners has acquired a majority stake in Rewind, giving the Ottawa company a well-heeled investor with a track record of scaling SaaS companies.
Founded in 2015, Rewind specializes in subscription-based software that automatically backs up and recovers data for users of cloud-based platforms such as Shopify and QuickBooks.
The company is one of the National Capital Region’s most notable tech success stories of the past decade, raising US$80 million in venture capital. It now protects data on 16 cloud-based applications for more than 25,000 organizations around the world.
But co-founder and CEO Mike Potter says Rewind has tapped into only a fraction of its potential market. For almost a year, the firm has been seeking an anchor investor to take it “to the next level” as some of its early backers looked to cash out, he explained to OBJ in an interview this week.
Now, Potter believes Rewind has found the ideal partners in H.I.G. Growth and its managing director Hans Sherman, who previously helped finance two other rising data backup ventures — U.S.-based AvePoint and Rubrik — that are now publicly traded companies.
“Those companies have gone on to do very well,” Potter said. “(Sherman) knew the (data) backup space, so that was one of the things that really attracted us to him in particular. He believes in the importance of backup and what we’re doing, and we really connected over that.”
The companies did not disclose financial details of the transaction. Potter said he and co-founder James Ciesielski, Rewind’s chief technology officer, will remain major shareholders, and previous investors Insight Partners and Inovia Capital will retain a stake in the firm.
But Potter acknowledged he expects H.I.G. to be more “hands-on” than earlier investors. While stressing that Rewind still has plenty of cash on hand, he said the firm was looking for a partner with both the know-how to help it scale and pockets deep enough to bankroll future M&A activity to further the company’s growth.
“It wasn’t a matter of us running out of money,” he explained. “There are companies that we would like to acquire that we’ve been talking to for a number of years that … are covering platforms that Rewind doesn’t currently cover, and we would love to bring them on board.
“I think access to that capital, access to the knowledge of what’s worked in the past and just their expertise in running a SaaS software company, that’s mainly what we’re expecting them to bring here.”
Now at nearly 100 employees, Rewind is growing revenues faster than it has in years as developers rush to back up their applications in the cloud and the artificial intelligence boom pushes data protection to the top of the agenda for SaaS companies, Potter said.
Shift to cloud a major catalyst
Much of the firm’s recent growth has been driven by Australian software firm Atlassian’s decision to phase out its data-centre products by 2029 and shift them to the cloud, he explained.
Rewind already backs up a number of Atlassian offerings, including bug-tracking software Jira and workspace collaboration platform Confluence, and Potter expects more organizations that use those products will turn to his company to ensure their data is protected.
“As they get forced into the cloud, they need a backup,” he said. “From a business perspective, we’ve got a really good tailwind there.”
While e-commerce companies such as Shopify still account for the majority of Rewind’s revenues, software developers that use products such as Jira, Confluence and GitHub are poised to overtake e-commerce as the firm’s biggest customer segment by the end of this year, Potter added.
“A lot of the large (Atlassian) customers that are being forced to migrate, they haven’t actually done that migration,” he said. “It’s a lot of work for them to move from this application that they were running locally or in a data centre to now running it in the cloud. The ones that have moved, we’re winning a lot of those deals, and there’s certainly a ton of business still left to migrate to the cloud from an Atlassian perspective that we are excited to help protect.”
Meanwhile, the rapid spread of AI agents that tap into data from SaaS applications has made software companies even more vulnerable to potential security breaches, he added.
“Those two events were really the catalyst to say, ‘Well, maybe this is a good time to see if we can find a partner here who can help us take Rewind to the next level.’”
The need for data backup and recovery tools like Rewind’s is growing “exponentially” as technology such as AI enters the mainstream, Sherman said.
“Rewind's differentiated platform closes the gap on business data left unprotected by SaaS platforms, delivering automated, compliant protection that becomes mission-critical for enterprises as they migrate to and adopt cloud environments,” he said in a news release. “We are excited to partner with Mike and the entire Rewind team to support their continued growth and expansion.”
