Indian financial services sector key growth area for us: Milind Borate, Co-Founder and CTO, Druva

Cloud data protection and management company Druva has doubled down on its efforts on winning new clients across the financial services sector in India and is bullish on research and development (R&D) at its Pune facilities to develop next-gen products and solutions for the world, Milind Borate, Co-Founder and CTO, Druva said.

From engineering major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) to professional services firm PwC India, the Pune-born Druva which now has its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California has a large footprint in the new financial services sector in the country.

“Insurance companies and mutual funds in India use our solutions in a big way. Startups are great customers but from the growth perspective, the revenue still comes from large organisations. Pfizer and NASA are our very large customers globally,” Borate told IANS.

Founded by CEO Jaspreet Singh and Borate in Pune in 2008, Druva has nearly 500 employees in Pune out of over 800 globally. The entire R&D work is being done from India. The firm has so far received $328 million in funding and crossed $1 billion in valuation this year with over 4,000 customers globally on board.

On data localization, Borate said they chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) because they practically have data centres all over, including in India.

“Everyone has to follow data residency and compliances and we respect that. The decision to choose AWS as the infrastructure vendor really helps because AWS has data centres practically in every region that we want to play into. For a local customer, they end up using that data centre and for an MNC depending on its requirements, the local offices would backup data to the AWS region out there,” Borate explained.

Funded by Sequoia Capital, Viking Global Investors, Tenaya Capital, Riverwood Capital and Nexus Partners, Druva now serves more than 10 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies, including firms such as Flex, Hitachi, Live Nation, Marriott and Pfizer.

“We built this our entire data protection engine on AWS, like a cloud native architecture. Today, we manage nearly 150 petabyte of data. Our largest customers are in the range of 10-15 petabyte each. They want to make sure it’s actually a cost-benefit exercise to them. AWS has come up with newer technologies to make sure that the cost of storing data — especially the cost of storing data for long-term retention — goes down. We use those technologies to make sure that we can pass on that benefit to our customers,” Borate mentioned.

On helping 51 million small and medium businesses (SMBs) in India migrate their workloads to the Cloud, Borate said they are willing to help them as they do not have the expertise to run their own data centres.

“For SMBs, the total cost of ownership really matters to them. What’s really important for them is the usability. How simple is the solution to actually deploy and use,” he added.

More than 600 customers rely on Druva to protect data centre workloads, a number that has grown by 70 per cent in a year. Over 800 customers are protecting their cloud workloads (SaaS applications and AWS workloads) — a figure that has almost doubled in the last 18 months.

The company has surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), marking a major milestone in the company’s hyper-growth journey.

“India is a critical market for us, especially at a time when the urge to go digital can be witness across industries as well as the governments. We are here to provide software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for data protection and management across edge, on-premises and cloud workloads, to the enterprises,” said Borate.