OwnBackup Soars with $240M Series E on $3.35B Valuation
OwnBackup, a leading Salesforce independent software vendor based in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, today announced it has secured a $240 million late stage equity investment, which puts the company at a post-money valuation of $3.35 billion. Separately, Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures updated their annual Cloud 100 ranking of private cloud company valuations where OwnBackup debuted at #92.
Late Stage Deal
The growth investors leading this deal are Alkeon Capital and B Capital Group Most existing growth and early-stage investors also participated, including BlackRock Private Equity Capital, Tiger Global, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and Insight Partners.
High Growth Coattails
OwnBackup is clearly riding the coattails of Salesforce’s recent growth. According to TechCrunch reporting, the company is using capital to deal with an extreme growth opportunity. Here are the main points from the reporting:
- Over 100% year-to-year growth since 2018
- 500 employees is double from last year
- Plans to go multi-cloud with Microsoft Dynamics 365 support
- Plans to use new capital for acquisitions and equity hiring
Another Multi-Cloud Aspirant
According to today’s press release, OwnBackup has plans to expand beyond Salesforce into Dynamics 365, which is a CRM and ERP online service sold by Microsoft. The press release also hints that OwnBackup is targeting other platforms.
Salesforce ISVs could be particularly well-suited to expanding their services beyond the Salesforce ecosystem. Several other Salesforce-specific software and services companies, including Copado and AppOmni, have made similar moves.
One factor that could favor Salesforce ISVs for expansion to other platforms is how hard it is to work with Salesforce as an application delivery platform in the first place.
For example, release management is a very complex topic in Salesforce, and Copado has been successful selling a release management platform that simplifies the task. As I wrote in Top 5 Salesforce Devops Startups, a key feature of a Salesforce devops platform is an extensive metadata database that scans Salesforce’s online platform. Since Copado has already built a metadata management platform for Salesforce, they have already created a system that may be adaptable to SAP.
The same advantage may apply to OwnBackup as they strike out for other platforms. Just like Copado, OwnBackup must scan a Salesforce org to determine its shape and how to perform backups. A similar database and service architecture may be advantageous as they branch out to Dynamics 365.
Cloud 100 Report Confirms Historic Growth
Bessemer Venture Partners has published a leading report on private cloud startups since 2016. This year’s report, made in conjunction with Salesforce Ventures and Forbes Magazine, boasted historic growth in the sector. For the first time, each company on the list exceeded a $1 billion valuation.
Twenty-two of last year’s companies graduated to being a publicly listed firm. The total valuation of the list went from $267 billion in 2020 to $518 billion, which is an astounding 94% year-to-year growth.
Obviously driven by pandemic-related digital projects, it is now apparent that a decade’s worth of digital adoption has been squeezed into an immediate-adoption time frame. The main question that remains is how much growth has been queued up in, and how long will it take for the cloud companies to service all the companies who have lined up for digital services. Until the majority of companies have shifted to a pure cloud business environment, these freakishly large growth numbers may continue.
More Equity Investment and M&A On The Horizon
With industry growth apparently not meeting the insatiable demand for cloud computing services, the remainder of 2021 and 2022 look to sustain an exciting level of startup company activity. So many companies have pulled the plug on old ways of doing things in every corner of the world, and with so many of those companies looking to Salesforce for solutions the Salesforce ecosystem must continue to grow like OwnBackup to meet the demand.
