Zerto Raises $26 Million in Series D

Zerto, Inc. has raised $26 million in series D financing.

New investor Harmony Partners led the financing, with participation by all current investors: Battery Ventures, Greylock IL, RTP Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners.

The round brings total financing to more than $60 million and provides a war chest to allow Zerto to expand its footprint, maintain long-term independence and focus major R&D efforts around the recently launched Cloud Fabric initiative for workload mobility in hybrid clouds.

With more than 500 enterprise customers and 100 managed cloud service providers (SCPs) including Terremark, KPN and Colt offering cloud DR powered by Zerto, the company has built a base to corner the market for virtualized DR services.

Having already built a solution for protecting and mobilizing production workloads, Zerto is positioned to offer similar solutions for any hybrid cloud, whether built on VMware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or OpenStack. Last month, the company unveiled this strategy – its Cloud Fabric roadmap – showing how it plans to take the industry lead in the movement, management and protection of production workloads in the hybrid cloud.

“We talked with a wide range of customers, MSPs, and VARs who surveyed the market for a hypervisor-based data replication software solution. The recurring theme we heard was that Zerto does exactly what it says it does. Customers used to dread big DR tests. Now they run them all the time and sleep better,” said Mark Lotke, managing partner, Harmony Partners.

Lotke added: “Zerto has become the clear market leader in hypervisor-based DR and there is a broad use case for their technology, with many additional applications beyond DR. Growth capital will help Zerto scale the business and quickly advance new market opportunities.”

Recent Milestones:

• Delivered Zerto Virtual Replication 3.5 which adds Offsite Backup, that, when coupled with Zerto’s existing hypervisor-based replication solution, provides comprehensive data protection for enterprises and CSPs.
• Opened offices in the UK and Australia to support huge international growth and pent-up customer demand.
• Achieved 200% year-over-year revenue growth.
• Surpassed more than 100 CSPs and 500 enterprise customers including well-known brands such as ING, Premier, and Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Group, while growing in the banking, technology, advertising, healthcare and higher education sectors.
• Identified by Gartner as a 2014 Cool Vendor.
• Expanded the Zerto Alliance Partner (ZAP) program and bestowed Zerto Certified Professional training and certifications to more than 300 partners, educating partners to sell Virtual Replication and helping to scale the sales operation worldwide.
• Outlined its Cloud Fabric strategy to offer enterprises and CSPs choice for operating virtualized workflows in any datacenter environment.

“At a time when the market is moving to software-defined ‘everything,’ Zerto offers crucial building blocks of the software-defined datacenter, namely virtualized DR, migration and workload mobility solutions,” said Ziv Kedem, CEO and co-founder, Zerto. “With our platform, companies can port their data to any cloud, on any hypervisor. Our Cloud Fabric vision is a huge leap forward for IT, and shows we’re continuing to innovate and stay ahead of the market.”

“Zerto launched the first hypervisor-based replication solution and customers are now leveraging this technology to enable the Hybrid Cloud. Zerto’s cloud Fabric offers seamless mobility for production workloads, enabling organizations to realize the hybrid cloud that has been marketed for so long. This round of financing enables Zerto to continue to deliver innovative software so applications can leverage any cloud, built on any hypervisor, for any use case – simply and easily,” said Laura DuBois, program VP, IDC storage and governance, risk and compliance programs.