Switzerland's Veeam Software just scooped up half a billion dollars in funding and the cofounder says he's ready to start buying companies
- Veeam Software announced Wednesday that it has raised $500 million in funding from Insight Venture Partners.
- With the additional funding, Veeam is looking at companies to possibly acquire this year, especially in cloud management, data management, artificial intelligence, or machine learning.
- Veeam is capitalizing on the cloud wars because as more customers shift to the cloud, Veeam can help customers with moving and managing their data.
Data management company Veeam Software raised $500 million in venture funding on Wednesday and signalled plans to bulk up with acquisitions this year.
The 12-year-old company, which is based in Switzerland, raised the money from Insight Venture Partners, with "strong participation from" the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Veeam did not disclose the company's valuation in the latest round of funding but said the capital will be used for product development, global expansion and M&A activity.
"We're looking at a few opportunities so might have one [acquisition] this year in 2019 and are evaluating different companies," Ratmir Timashev, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Veeam told Business Insider.
The next two to three years are going to be packed with major potential for Veeam, Timashev said. He predicts that the coming years will determine who will be the leader in cloud.
Veeam generates about $1 billion in annual revenue and has over 320,000 customers, according to the company. Timashev says that it has had 40 quarters in the last 10 years with double digit growth, and out of those, 30 were profitable.
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"We've seen this company perform exceptionally well," Michael Triplett, managing director at Insight Venture Partners, told Business Insider. "It's very rare within a ten year time frame for a company to go from 0 to 1 billion in sales. We made this further investment because we see Veeam continue to be the number one software vendor in its market segment."
Time to go shopping
Veeam cofounder Timashev said he's looking for technology companies in cloud management, data management, artificial intelligence, or machine learning -- technologies that will complement Veeam's data management abilities. Just last year, Veeam acquired N2W software, which provides a cloud backup solution for AWS workloads.
"There's more companies growing pretty fast," Timashev said. "We believe we will need to accelerate and are looking to acquire some innovative technologies, primarily in the area similar to what we've done with N2WS."
Veeam previously focused on data management on premises, but it's been expanding into cloud. And as more companies move onto the cloud, Veeam is well-positioned to help them do that.
"The next ten years are about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud," Timashev said. "The next two to three years are the most important. We've got the capital and resources to accelerate our growth."