Ottawa data protection software firm Rewind has boosted its total 2021 funding haul to US$80-million after raising a US$65-million series-B round to finance its push into new markets.
New York-based Insight Partners led the new round, which also included previous investors Besserer Venture Partners, FundFire, Inovia Capital, Ridge Ventures and ScaleUP Ventures as well as new investors Atlassian Ventures and Union Ventures.
Rewind’s latest big raise is the second-largest VC deal of the year in the capital after biotech firm Turnstone Biologics’ US$80-million series-D round in July. It comes fast on the heels of the company’s US$15-million series-A round that was announced in January.
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Co-founder and CEO Mike Potter said the firm plans to use the money to boost its team of developers and hire more marketing experts as it expands into new markets.
“We just continue to see massive opportunities in this space,” he told OBJ on Tuesday. “I think what we’re doing is kind of removing the question mark of ‘Do you need backups for SaaS?’ The answer is clearly you do.”
Insight operating partner John True said demand for cloud backup and recovery tools is expected to rise dramatically in the coming years, adding Rewind has positioned itself to be an industry leader.
Protection from cyber-attacks
“We see Rewind as a pillar of the cloud backup and recovery space,” he said in a statement.
Founded in 2015, Rewind specializes in software that backs up and recovers customer data for Shopify merchants and users of other cloud-based software platforms. It now stores data from more than 40,000 customer accounts on encrypted servers, ensuring sensitive information is protected from events such as power outages or cyber-attacks.
Many of its 22,000 active users are merchants who operate online stores on Shopify’s platform. Rewind’s revenues have been more than doubling year over year as its massive e-commerce partner has grown into one of the world’s most prominent software companies.
While most of Rewind’s income originally came from Shopify-powered storefronts, that’s changing as the company expands its backup services to users of other platforms, including Shopify competitor BigCommerce and accounting software giant QuickBooks.
“Rewind’s vision remains to back up every SaaS service that’s out there.”
The company recently began offering its platform to customers of software firms Trello and GitHub. It’s about to launch a product for users of customer support software Zendesk and is eyeing potential products catering to users of other software such as Basecamp, Hubspot and Xero.
“We’ve got some pretty good scale here,” Potter said. “Obviously, we think we can take that to the next level. Rewind’s vision remains to back up every SaaS service that’s out there.”
Potter said he wasn’t expecting to land two major funding rounds in 2021, but the series-A raise triggered a flood of interest in the upstart firm.
“I think that really raised the profile of Rewind,” he said.
While piles of offer sheets were suddenly landing on his desk, Potter said and his team had been in talks with Insight Partners for a while and liked what the New York firm brought to the table.
Insight’s other investments include OwnBackup, which backs up data for Salesforce customers, and Veeam, which provides similar services for users of Google and Microsoft 365 software.
“Insight was really interesting to us because they are already in the backup space,” Potter explained. “It was pretty evident to us that they were the best partner for us to go with.”
Rewind now has 110 employees, up from 65 at the beginning of the year, and expects to more than double its headcount to between 250 and 300 by the end of 2022.
But Potter concedes that finding top talent is easier said than done.
“If we could hire 25 senior software developers today, we would do that,” he said. “It’s tough to find these people, and we need them quickly.”
