Niagara Falls of cash: Storage startup Rubrik showers in VC moolah

Palo Alto storage software startup Rubrik has inhaled $261m in an E-round of funding, taking its total funding to north of $553m and giving it a $3.3bn valuation.

Investors in the five-year-old firm include Bain Capital Ventures, investing in Rubrik for the first time, and existing investors Lightspeed, Greylock, Khosla, and IVP.

In a blast from the past, Enrique Salem, former Symantec CEO (circa 2012), was quoted as saying: "Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management."

Rubrik, which ultimately hopes to IPO, said it has thousands of customers around the globe, and now employs more than 1,300 people.

In June last year, secondary storage-converging Cohesity, a Rubrik competitor, pulled in $250m in a D-round of funding, taking total funding to $410m.

Rubrik's D-round of $180m, which took place in 2017, took it to a total funding of $292m. This new cash infusion brings total cash injections to over half a billion bucks.

Rubrik said the new cash would be used for general corporate purposes, continued R&D and to support the launch of "major new products planned for 2019," which will relate to the public cloud and data growth.

The company added it would also invest more in go-to-market activities with its partners - including Microsoft, Cisco, AWS, SAP, Nutanix, Oracle, VMware, Google Cloud, Pure Storage, and others. ®