HYCU, Inc. a
pioneering enterprise software company specializing in multi-cloud data backup
and recovery as a service By bringing true SaaS-based data backup to both
on-premises and cloud-native environments, the company provides industry-leading
data protection, migration and disaster recovery to more than 2,000 companies
worldwide. Based in Boston, Mass., the company employs 200 people across the
globe.
This week,
HYCU announced the company secured its first institutional round of financing.
With $87.5M in a Series A round led by Bain Capital Ventures and participation
by Acrew Capital, VMblog spoke with Founder and CEO Simon Taylor. Simon shared
more on why the need for funding and what the company plans to do next.
VMblog: HYCU has been self-funded and
privately held, why the need for funding and why now?
Simon Taylor: This is HYCU's first institutional
round of financing in a Series A from Bain Capital Ventures. While Bain Capital
Ventures led the round, Acrew Capital participated as well. HYCU has been
organically growing its business since founding and after amassing more than
2,000 customers, it became clear now was the right time to accelerate growth.
VMblog: What are your plans to use the financing?
Taylor: We plan to leverage the funding in five key areas.
- Expand
our executive team.
- Add more than
100 sales and marketing professionals worldwide including a number in
Boston, Massachusetts where the company is headquartered.
- Increase
product coverage across all major clouds. We currently support both
Nutanix and VMware for on-premises and Azure Cloud, Google Cloud and AWS
as a target and for Nutanix Clusters on AWS and VMware on AWS. We
introduced support for our first SaaS-based solution with HYCU for O365
earlier this year and plan to continue supporting additional SaaS-based
solutions as well as deepening support for all clouds.
- Continue our
commitment to put the customer first with a broad expansion of our
industry-leading customer success team. We've worked hard over the past
two years to exceed customer expectations and truly provide an exemplary
customer delight experience. As of today, we're proud that our Net
Promoter Score, the percentage that our customers rate the likelihood they
would recommend HYCU and our solutions to a friend or colleague, is at 91.
This isn't marketing babble to us but a way in which we align our product
development and support efforts and we validate with a third-party
resource. It's a good barometer to measure the way in which we are
engaging with customers and aligning to their business and IT needs.
- Increase our
commitment to the channel with new channel executives in every major
territory. Our Go-to-Market is 100% partner dependent. Our success is
ultimately our partner's success.
VMblog: What will this Series A funding
support? Are there new executive hires anticipated? Any specific regions of the
world or North America only?
Taylor: HYCU Is in hyper-growth mode and the
company plans to announce new executive hires in the coming weeks. We plan to add
more than 100 employees in marketing, sales, and customer success alone in
2021. The company also plans to support growth in EMEA and emerging regions of
the world including Japan and ANZ.
VMblog: Is HYCU stating a valuation at
this point in time? What are the plans for the future?
Taylor: We're excited to be joining the Bain
Capital Ventures family and as a Series A, HYCU is not providing a valuation at
this point in time. There are a number of projections in the market that range
between $10-15BN. We anticipate this round of funding will provide us
significant resources to capture more of that market opportunity. As for future
plans, our goal at is to ensure that a majority of the world's companies are
able to take advantage of the security, simplicity and protection afforded by
HYCU and the HYCU Protégé platform. We envision HYCU as a multi-billion dollar
company that will be best supported by the public markets at a point in the
future that makes the most sense.
VMblog: Why did Bain Capital Ventures
choose HYCU to invest in?
Taylor: HYCU has all the ingredients for
success that has historically been a company that Bain Capital Ventures invests
in. SaaS simplicity, an industry-leading Net Promoter score of 91 NPS and 450%
y-o-y growth clearly differentiated HYCU as a company on track to achieve its
aggressive growth goals in the next three years. As Enrique Salem, Bain Capital
Ventures Partner and soon to join the HYCU Board of Directors as Chairman of
the Board, "We are in the early days of a multi-decade shift to the public
cloud. Existing on-premises backup vendors are poorly equipped to enable this
transition which in turn creates tremendous opportunity for a new category of
cloud-native backup providers." HYCU has been one of the early players in
multi-cloud backup as a service working to bring true SaaS to both on-premises
and cloud-native environments. Doing this has helped HYCU to become a pioneer
and leader in a space that will continue to create large multi-billion dollar
companies.
VMblog: Will this funding help with product
development? Future initiatives? If so, how?
Taylor: This round of funding will most
definitely help HCYU continue to deliver innovation our customers and partners
have come to expect. The list of HYCU firsts and uniques is impressive and
growing and this round of funding will only accelerate our efforts to deliver
unrivaled simplicity and intelligent automation of cloud-native, as a service
solutions to our customers and partners to address their multi-cloud
infrastructure environments. You can expect to see a consistent cadence of
innovations from HYCU throughout 2021 and well into the future.
VMblog: You recently introduced support
for Microsoft365 (O365), what other SaaS-based applications are in plans to
support and when do you anticipate supporting them?
Taylor: We were thrilled by the reception to
our latest SaaS-based solution. With that said, we have no plans to become an
O365 backup company. Our focus continues to be on providing customers with the
right solution to best address their data protection, backup and recovery needs
for on-premises and public clouds. O365 support was just the first in a series
of SaaS-based applications HYCU will support in 2021. There is definitely more
to come!
VMblog: Why does HYCU feel it can succeed
in a crowded marketspace with both well-funded competitors and large,
privately-held and publicly traded companies?
Taylor: In IT, there are moments in time when
significant market trends along with certain innovations create the perfect
storm. We are at an inflection point where companies need to maximize their
move to the cloud without discarding their existing investment in on-premises
infrastructure requirements. We see the future as a service where solutions
like HYCU support and augment existing cloud platforms without adding
unnecessary complexity and redundancy. At the end of the day, customers should
not have to create another silo or infrastructure to support their on-prem and
public cloud infrastructures. We think moving, protecting, managing and
recovering data across multi-clouds should be a 1-click process with built-in
simplicity.
VMblog: Today marks World Backup Day, what
are you doing to celebrate?
Taylor: It's great that there is a day every
year where we get to focus on backup. But let's not lose sight of the big
picture. Recovery is equally important. With that said, any day that we can
celebrate taking care of your important data, files and workloads is truly
special. Just make sure you're using HYCU!.
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Simon Taylor is the Founder and CEO at HYCU, Inc. As CEO,
Simon creates and executes on the vision and strategy of the fast-growing
global company. Prior to HYCU, Simon held senior executive positions at
Comtrade Software. Simon also held management and leadership positions at
Putnam Investments, Omgeo and Forrester Research. Simon sits on the board of
directors of College Bound Dorchester and is an active member of YPO (Young
Presidents Organization) in Boston. He holds an MBA from Instituto de Empressa
(Madrid) and an BSc Operations Technology from Northeastern University.