HYCU

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Founders: Goran Garevski & Simon Taylor
Founding: 2018
Mission: Safer data for a safer world
Employees: 300 & 15% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $140M Raised
Investors: Acrew Capital, Atlassian Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Cisco Investments, Okta Ventures
Key Customers: Boston Red Sox, Broadcom, Callaway Golf, Cloud Software Group, US Army
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): $250M – $750M (assuming they sold ~15-20% of the company in the $53M Q2 ‘22 Series B fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

HYCU (pronounced haiku) is “data protection software” that helps customers discover and visualize their data across public & private clouds, providing a horizontal backup across all cloud workflows and platforms. Or, as shared in their Series B fundraise announcement, “The Beatles of Backup.”

HYCU was founded in 2018 by former Comtrade Software colleagues Goran Garevski & Simon Taylor. Goran was the VP of Engineering in Slovenia, Simon was the President in Boston, and when they got together over a meal they discussed the challenges and intricacies of data management across a proliferation of sources. It felt like the data protection industry hadn’t kept pace with the pace of modern cloud growth. An idea was born and a startup soon followed. Let it be? No way, there was an opportunity to lead some disruption.

It’s important to put into context some of the numbers behind the secular explosion and corporate migration to the cloud. From 2010 to 2020, the global cloud computing and hosting market size increased by 500%+, cloud spending is nearing $200B per year, and 60% of corporate data is reported to be stored in the cloud (src). Protecting the majority of your assets, now held digitally, is table stakes. With the proliferation of data across on-premises, cloud, and now SaaS applications, it was critical to find a way to address each with enterprise-class data protection.

The team got to work building their flagship platform HYCU R-Cloud. This solution allows customers to see, manage, protect, and recover data across leading platforms but importantly for the growing number of SaaS applications in use across the average size business. At last count, global companies used an average of 371 SaaS applications compared to 217 in 2022 (src). These applications like Atlassian Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, Docusign, GitHub, GitLab, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Okta, Salesforce, and more. In addition to these and more than 90 SaaS and cloud services, HYCU supports large public clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud along with private clouds like Nutanix & VMware. 

HYCU R-Cloud integrates across more than 440 partners worldwide and helps protect the growing number of data silos per customer, helping to integrate and backup data at the infrastructure, database, and application layers with both public and private cloud providers. It’s a lot of words, I know. But that just speaks to the complexity!

HYCU’s offering spans backup recovery, data migration and disaster recovery horizontally across providers. Their tools allow IT Administrators to manage & protect data across all of these workloads in a single dashboard in order to manage policies, change permissions, and deliver role based controls to create a safer enterprise. 

In March of 2021, they raised $87.5M Series A with Acrew Capital and Bain Capital Ventures (BCV). In June of 2022 they raised a $53M Series B with Atlassian Ventures, Cisco Investments, and Okta Ventures joining returning investors Acrew Capital and BCV. The three new strategic investors, along with original investors Acrew Capital and BCV should be able to help HYCU advance their strategic goals and reach more enterprise customers in the quarters ahead.Today HYCU has brought on 4,400+ customers, 400+ partners, and 100% revenue growth over the past 12 months with 150% year over year bookings growth. Their valuation has 4x’d over that same time period too. Their NPS is 91 and they’ve sold to customers in 78+ countries. The team was named a 2024 Google Cloud Partner of the Year, Visionary in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software Solutions and a 2024 Boston Business Journal Best Place to Work.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the HYCU team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired (Locally):

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 300 employees?
  • Could you share some details on the operating practices of the company? With 15% of the team in Boston and the majority of technical talent in Europe, how do you manage tight communication? 
  • What is the long term vision for the platform and company?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add as you approach 2025 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about HYCU you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more backup into the digital age. All enterprise customers applaud your efforts. See you around the Internet!

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