Eon, the vendor aiming to reinvent Cloud Infrastructure Backup, has emerged from stealth and raised $127 million. Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks, and dozens of industry leaders back the significant funding.
The firm was founded by some of the teams that created CloudEndure, which Amazon Web Services later acquired. Ofir Ehrlich, CEO and Gonen Stein, CRO, are joined by Ron Kimchi, CTO, who all worked together at AWS.
The founders were instrumental in building and leading the development of Disaster Recovery and Cloud Migration services at AWS. However, at the start of 2024, they believed that a new approach was needed, and there was a gap in the market.
This is an unusual amount of money from some serious investors. Eon claims to be the first backup autopilot for Cloud Infrastructure. The founders claim that Eon will replace legacy backup solutions and generic snapshots with a flexible and easy-to-manage solution that leverages cloud backup posture management (CBPM).
Ofir Ehrlich, Co-Founder and CEO of Eon, commented, “Eon has reimagined what backups can be for enterprises by introducing a new era of cloud backup storage and management. We are fortunate to have supportive funding partners who deeply understand the value of unlocking cloud backups to be truly automated, globally searchable, portable, and useful.”
Eon proactively examines an enterprise’s cloud assets. It scans, maps and classifies cloud assets and provides backup recommendations based on the actual business and compliance needs. Thus it dynamically ensures that the best backup policy is in place.
Eon created a fully searchable record of assets. Thus enabling customers to quickly locate and restore individual files and even run SQL queries on backed-up database snapshots. Traditional snapshots are less dynamic and do not always support file-level restoration.
10 months in 3 funding rounds complete
The announcement follows the third round of funding for the company. In total, it has raised funding three times. Firstly, a seed round led by Sequoia Capital raised $20 million with participation from Vine Ventures, Meron Capital, and Eight Roads. Secondly, its Series A funding round raised $30 million and was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and participation from Sheva. Lastly and most recently, a Series B round of $77 million was led by Greenoaks with participation from Quiet Ventures.
Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital, said, “In an industry where file restoration can take weeks, Eon’s novel backup solution pinpoints data instantly, saving time, money, and compliance headaches for customers. With a world-class team led by cloud pioneers Ofir, Gonen, and Ron – Eon is bringing the next generation of cloud backup management to market.”
Tal Morgenstern, Partner at Lightspeed, commented, “Investing in the right company begins with investing in the right team, and with Eon, we saw an exceptional team, uniquely skilled for the task at hand. Eon is addressing a critical need as enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption and face headwinds of data protection concerns. We are thrilled to support their mission.”
Patrick Backhouse, Partner at Greenoaks, said, “Storage and backup are among the largest parts of the IT budget. Yet customers are stuck with frustrating, outdated options, leaving them with poorly-optimized costs; incomplete data inventories; and shallow classification. Eon has the team, the expertise, and the ambition to develop an entirely new product that we believe will become the cognitive referent for cloud-native backup. We are proud to partner with Ofir and his team early in their journey as they break the tradeoff between price, performance, and transparency.”
Why now? Why such big investors?
The Eon teams come with the experience of leading a company through to exit. They are experienced in developing and delivering a product to market. But what is the opportunity that attracted these investors?
The global cloud infrastructure market is projected to surpass around USD 837.97 billion by 2034, at a CAGR of 12.3% by 2024. Eon estimates that as much as 10-30% of enterprise infrastructure costs is spent on backup storage and management.
However, Grand View Research put the global cloud backup market at $4.69 billion in 2023. But growing at a rate of 24.4% to 2030, or $21.14 billion.
Backup is still a demanding task for many IT departments. If Eon has come up with a solution that mitigates the challenge and can expand fast enough, it could capture a large share of the market.
One question will be whether investors enable the firm to grow to a market leader or whether another company, like AWS will come in to snatch the new technology.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
As of writing, Eon is still fully in stealth. Hopefully, the website will launch, and there will be more information about the technology and early customers.
This is a company that is emerging with ambitions for growth. It will be interesting to see how Stein shapes that. Will it initially look just for penetration into the US market or something wider? It certainly has the funds to make a big impact on the market.
