Datto, which handles hybrid cloud business continuity and disaster, has always been all about MSPs and partners, of which it counts some 5,000.
Now the company is getting really serious about MSPs, and so are its investors. In fact, the company just got a $25 million infusion from General Catalyst Partners. At the same time, it added two serious execs to its board of directors. Now with General Catalyst, Steve Herrod was CTO of VMware and Peter Sagan was executive vice president at Web caching firm Akamai.
Datto, now six years old, has never taken venture funding before this. The cash will be used to provide more customer services, grow internationally, and fund new products.
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Datto CEO and founder Austin McChord is looking forward to the help: “Steve and his team at General Catalyst Partners, and Paul with his breadth of industry knowledge, will add unique value based on their experience and foresight. They have a truly deep understanding of the business and culture of Datto, and this investment will help us further the rapid growth of the company, and allow us deliver solutions that will change the way businesses think about using the cloud for backup and disaster recovery around the globe.”
McChord will remain majority stakeholder, and there will be no changes to Datto’s executive team.
One thing Herrod brings to the table is a deep knowledge of virtualization, a technology that underlies much of Datto’s hybrid cloud approach to storage.
“Virtualization is an essential technology for server applications, storage, networking, security and all aspects of the modern datacenter,” Herrod noted. “Austin and the Datto team have created an innovative company that offers valuable solutions to its partners and serves as a true ally to the I.T. channel. This is an organization that I wanted to be a part of.”
Hybrid Hook
Datto uses a hybrid cloud approach to protecting data. Here data is stored where it is created such as on a PC or server. It is backed up on an on-premises Datto NAS appliance. Then this data is replicated to the cloud.
What is different about this hybrid cloud approach is that the two tiers of backup data is actually held in virtual machines that don’t just contain the data, but the environment that surrounds it and makes it useful. This way in the event of a crash the VM is activated and business continues as usual.
With Datto, virtual and physical machines are all protected, and recovery time is almost instant.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
