Enterprise Unicorn Rubrik More Than Doubles Valuation To $3.3 Billion

Rubrik joined the billion-dollar startup ranks nearly two years ago. Now after new funding, the data company is one of the highest valued in enterprise software.

Palo Alto-based Rubrik announced on Tuesday that it had raised $261 million in Series E funding at a $3.3 billion valuation. The round, led by Bain Capital Ventures and including previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and IVP, more than doubles Rubrik's valuation since its last raise in April 2017, when Rubrik was valued at $1.3 billion.

Companies pay Rubrik for a service that for years was one of the core, if not most innovative areas of data management: backup and recovery. Rubrik's twist was to provide software to connect a company's on-premise servers, where it would historically keep the back-ups of all its important data, to the cloud, allowing a company to move the data back and forth based on its use and the company's security and compliance needs. Rubrik then offered software that could keep track of that data, meaning that applications or services running on top of it would access the backup data, before being left largely untouched unless needed in an emergency, to run those apps faster.

"If you look at the whole data ecosystem, we are the fulcrum of enterprise data strategy," says CEO Bipul Sinha. "Our ability to drive analytics and compliance creates this tremendous opportunity to really establish ourselves as the data management platform."

Why Bain Capital Ventures would give Rubrik such a rich valuation, the company says, is a combination of its pace of growth and the size of its market. Backup data and recovery was once a $30 billion-plus market, says Sinha, with data management a $48 billion one. Compare that to Rubrik, which already has multi-million contracts, its CEO says, with large insurance companies, banks and the likes of Cisco and Expedia. While Rubrik declined to provide its revenue, Sinha notes the company doubled its employee base from 700 employees to 1,400 in the past year.

Rubrik says it didn't raise the money out of a concern increasingly felt around Silicon Valley: that the money may dry up for startups in upcoming months due to market volatility. The company raised the round late in 2018, when the market was fluctuating, says Sinha, who argues that businesses like Rubrik with steady revenue and growth and sustainable rates of spending can raise in any market.

But Rubrik would take advantage of a "wobble" in the market to consider acquisition opportunities, its CEO says.

Rubrik's raise continues something of an arms race with its leading startup rival, Cohesity. The two companies have history — Cohesity's CEO was once CTO at Nutanix, where Sinha was an investor and board member — and both have raised large sums from private investors. Last June, Cohesity announced a $250 million investment by SoftBank at a valuation just north of $1 billion. Now Rubrik has tripled that.

As Rubrik's valuation works its way to one of the highest among private tech companies, Sinha believes he's building one of the "most important" tech companies unknown to the average techie, let alone the general public.

"We are taking this market, and it has been a bit of a backwater, and we are redesigning and rethinking the whole thing," Sinha says. "That transformation, people are catching on, and we think we are leading the market transition."