Commvault Acquires Start-Up Clumio

Commvault Systems, Inc. will acquire Clumio, Inc., in data protection for critical cloud data in AWS.

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This transaction enables Commvault to leverage Clumio’s AWS offerings to provide cyber resilience to next gen applications built on AWS. Clumio serves a range of customers including Atlassian, Cox Automotive, Duolingo, and LexisNexis.

More and more organizations are relying on Amazon S3 as their de facto storage offering, including for AI development in the cloud. Clumio has brought groundbreaking innovations to market in this area, including technologies that enable customers to have near-instant access to their Amazon S3 data during a time-critical recovery operation.

“In the event of an outage or cyberattack, rapidly getting back to business is paramount to our customers,” said Commvault CEO Sanjay Mirchandani. “Combining Commvault’s industry-leading cyber resilience capabilities with Clumio’s exceptional talent, technology, and AWS expertise advances our recovery offerings, strengthens our platform, and reinforces our position as a leading SaaS provider for cyber resilience.”

“At Clumio, our vision was to build a platform that could scale quickly to protect the world’s largest and most complex data sets, including data lakes, warehouses, and other business-critical data,” said Poojan Kumar, co-founder of Clumio. “Joining hands with Commvault allows us to get our cloud-native offerings to AWS customers on a global scale.”

The asset acquisition is expected to close in early October 2024, and be immediately accretive to ARR and revenue, and accretive to free cash flow within the next three quarters. The purchase price is not material to Commvault and will be funded with cash on hand. Commvault reiterates the 2FQ25 earnings guidance previously announced on July 30, 2024.

BofA Securities served as a financial advisor and Hogan Lovells LLP served as legal counsel to Commvault in connection with the transaction.

Comments

Is it a surprise? We mean didn't any of our readers anticipate such a move for Clumio as the company based in Santa Clara, CA, was very confidential, got many rounds and executives shuffles. Honestly this trajectory was anticipated and we were just waiting when it would occurred.

As SaaS and more globally cloud has become more and more important for enterprises, having a serious footprint in the domain by some vendors make sense and several of them decided to make a move. 2024 is a pivot year for data backup, take a look at this list covering SaaS and cloud backup:

Commvault picked Clumio assets,

Veeam swallowed Alcion,

ConnectWize acquired Axcient and SkyKick,

Salesforce bought Own,

EQT secured Acronis,

Cohesity should finally merge with Veritas' NetBackup unit before the end of the calendar year,

of course we must mention Datto acquired by Kaseya in 2022 for $6.2 billion to complement its line with Unitrends and Spanning Cloud,

and to complete the picture, we have to list Rubrik's IPO last April.

They all play in SaaS and cloud backup in addition to other segments but their solutions are different coming from different horizons.

For sure it's not finished, some companies still are on the market, being serious preys, and others missed the wagon so they will probably jump into the acquisition train. What is sure is that this segment is under a serious consolidation.

Founded in 2017 by Poonan Kumar, Kaustubh Patil and Woon Ho Jung, the company has raised $261 million with private investors including Mark Leslie and John Thompson with 4 VC rounds. This amount could appear as a high level for a cloud software entity. For our audience, Kumar founded PernixData he sold to Nutanix in 2016.

But what was the trigger for this exit? And what is the price?
It appeared that Clumio hit a wall under the pressure of investors that considered some poor performance. It is confirmed by the transaction price with just $47 million which represents a significant drop from the total raised amount and obviously from the valuation. Investors exit this adventure naked.

Why did Commvault make this choice? Why does Commvault need something?
It's a bargain, a bit like the one initiated by Cohesity, as they both really needs a second wave. Cohesity is a more recent player that needs a real push looking for its IPO for a few years and Commvault still appearing as a dinosaur in the domain wishing to clean its image in today's data management wave with VM, container, cloud and SaaS requirements. Of course Commvault promotes Metallic which is a respectable success. And Clumio came to polish this image and deliver some real additional cloud and AWS capabilities. But now Commvault has 3 products... and we saw in the past some product synergies failures and convergence difficulties.

And now?
We can imagine some other moves, we had so many so far in the domain. Who is on the list? Asigra, Druva, HYCU, N-able, Arcserve... We'll see. What about OpenText as Mark Barrenechea still is very ambitious in the domain. And for some gadgets, the life will be tough, we'll see but it's not finished for sure...