Runa Capital, a global venture capital firm operating from Russia and California, has sold its minority stake in cloud backup solution provider BackupAgent to Acronis, an international provider of data backup software and disaster recovery solutions. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.
“Becoming part of Acronis supports BackupAgent’s vision of becoming the world’s leading cloud backup player,” commented BackupAgent founders Roland Sars and Robbert van Geldrop.
BackupAgent was founded in the Netherlands 2005 with the vision of replacing traditional backup methods with a user-friendly cloud backup platform. The company enables service providers to offer cloud backup solutions from their own datacenters, or from the BackupAgent’s datacenters located in the USA, Europe and Asia. BackupAgent now claims to serve more than 900 service providers, protecting petabytes of data for more than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses across the world.
Since its inception, the Dutch company has raised two rounds in venture funding: in 2007, an undisclosed amount came from Solid Ventures, then in 2013 a $2 million round was led by Runa Capital.
Still headquartered in the Netherlands, BackupAgent has R&D teams in Russia and Ukraine. The Ukrainian team is located in Dnepropetrovsk, a major city in the East of the country that has fortunately not been affected so far by the ongoing unrest in the region.
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With this acquisition, existing Acronis and BackupAgent partners will receive what the companies present as “the most complete data protection and cloud backup solution to offer to their customers.”
“Using the Acronis technology, BackupAgent cloud expertise and existing channels, plus our deep technology and business ties with Parallels, we are able to deliver the most complete and the most service provider-friendly solution on the market,” added Sergei Beloussov, the serial tech entrepreneur who is behind both Acronis and Runa.
Putting aside this circumstance, this acquisition is Runa Capital’s fourth exit, following ThinkGrid (acquired by Colt Telecom in 2012), Stop The Hacker (acquired by CloudFlare in 2014), and Capptain (acquired by Microsoft in 2014).
Launched in 2010 by Sergei Beloussov, Ilya Zybarev and Dmitry Chikhachev, Runa Capital has operated globally after an initial focus on Russia. Over the years, the fund amassed $135 million in committed capital and invested in a number of Californian and Western European startups. Two months ago, Runa announced the first closing of a new fund with a target size of $200 million. While the segment focus of Runa II is similar to that of Runa I – including cloud computing, hosted services, virtualization, mobile applications and IT-solutions for education, healthcare, social and FinTech – the geographical focus is shifting to invest more in Central, Eastern and Western European regions.
