Surprise, Veeam raises $500M

Veeam Software, one of the data protection leader and member of the storage unicorn club, has just made a surprising announcement. The company, still private, has a annual revenue around $1B with lots of cash but it seems to be not enough to support the next phase o f the company. But as the pressure gets stronger especially from players such Rubrik or Cohesity, the management has to change rapidly its strategy to limit potential erosion.

Insight Venture Partners and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board have injected $500M to support that organic growth and M&A. With approximately $800M of cash available, the new sum reaches now $1.3B, largely enough to consider serious acquisitions. Veeam realizes that they need external IP and new product blood and this move explained why the former co-CEO Peter McKay left the company a few months ago. That exit illustrates a strong divergence at the executive level and finally Russian won.

Coming from the SMB market segment and strong support in channel, Veeam is not seen as an enterprise solution and suffers from this lack of credibility. A few axis for Veeam to gain fast this credibility towards Data Management: Cloud capabilities with Tiering, Enterprise Data Protection with archiving and advanced support of containers, applications HA and of course GDPR additions.

Last point, the Veeam press release is funny as they completely omitted Veritas as the obvious data protection leader. Veeam tries to be the new Veritas but the road is long, very long...