The companies declined to specify the size of the investment. The funding totaled in the low tens of millions and valued Rubrik at about $4 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private terms. Rubrik was started with the idea of modernizing the market for data-backup software, taking on a previous generation of vendors like EMC, now part of Dell Technologies, and Veritas, now owned by the Carlyle Group.
The two companies will jointly sell software based on Microsoft’s Azure cloud to prevent, find and recover from ransomware attacks. The products also make sure backup copies of customer data and cloud software haven’t been compromised by the hackers, said Rubrik Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Bipul Sinha. The companies currently share 2,000 customers.
“When an attacker tells you they have control to the keys to your data and you can’t get it back without paying a ransom, this allows us to have an alternative source for that data in real time to be able to bring that company back to operational control,” Tyler Bryson, a Microsoft vice president, said in an interview. “There’s a lot of backup solutions out there, but even those are vulnerable to having been compromised. If you didn’t design with the modern cloud architecture in mind, you may find you’ve just recovered to something already compromised.”
