Multi-cloud data protection and management firm HYCU has announced new investment from Okta Ventures, which will be used not only to grow the company further, but to help it enter a whole new ecosystem of customers and partners.
Okta is a leading identity and access management (IAM) firm and has many thousands of partners and brand name customers, and runs the $50m-plus Okta Ventures fund, which has so far invested in around 20 different technology companies.
At the IT Press Tour of Silicon Valley this week, attended by IT Europa, HYCU was tight-lipped about how much Okta has invested in the firm, but confirmed it wasn’t just about money.
HYCU CEO Simon Taylor said: “Our other investors include leading companies like Atlassian and Cisco, for instance, and these investments are certainly strategic for our business and operations.”
He confirmed that Okta’s ecosystem of partners and customers was of prime interest, and that the company would reveal more about how the firm’s own products and services would take advantage of the alliance “in about a month”.
It just so happens that Okta holds its oktane22 partner and customer conference in San Francisco from 8 November. HYCU has around 350 partners of its own.
It has been a time of rapid growth for HYCU and in two funding rounds it has raised $140m. Some of this cash will be used to hire an extra 100 people in the coming months, as it looks to cash in on new markets.
It recently launched a free tier of its HYCU Protégé data backup and management software platform for Amazon workloads, and on the IT Press Tour it pushed its new cloud-first backup strategy for the edge, which involves helping customers keep snapshots local and copies in the public cloud.
To do the latter, the vendor has made modifications to its software, to help create a better “pipe” between the edge and the cloud, for instance.
