In the next 24 hours, Internet users worldwide will generate at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. Though it’s almost impossible to capture just how much data is circulating, IDC estimates 74 zettabytes of data will be created, consumed, and stored in the world this year, up from just 18 zettabytes five years ago. One zettabyte is equal to a trillion gigabytes; to imagine just how immense this number is, if each gigabyte were a brick, with one zettabyte, you could build 258 entire Great Walls of China, each with 3,873,000,000 bricks. The nearly inconceivable amount of data in existence today is only going to accelerate exponentially, hitting 149 zettabytes by 2024.

No matter what sector of the economy, every company knows its data is valuable; we’ve all heard that ‘data is the new oil’. Yet data is everywhere, stored both on-premise and in public clouds, so without an effective way to capture it all safely and seamlessly across platforms, it isn’t worth much at all.

Today, BCV is excited to announce that we’re leading a $87.5 million Series A investment into HYCU, provider of the first purpose-built multi-cloud backup service. HYCU is the only company that delivers cloud-native enterprise data protection and recovery as a cost-effective SaaS offering, working for both on-premise and cloud environments. Every company has data they need to protect and secure, so every company needs HYCU — creating a massive market opportunity for this fast-growing, technically-advanced company.

HYCU Fixes Fragmented Data Backup

As CEO of Symantec for over a decade, I ran one of the largest data protection and backup businesses in the world, generating over $2 billion in annual revenue. I saw firsthand how companies struggled to securely store and access their data, and this challenge has grown all the more complex with the exponential rise in data coupled with the ubiquity of cloud computing. Now, companies live in a hybrid multi-cloud world with their data and applications hosted both on-premise and on various public and enterprise clouds, and they must ensure their data is safely stored and backed up across all of these environments.

BCV believes multi-cloud data backup as a service is a new category that could well eclipse the current $10 billion+ annual global market for data protection solutions. This led us to HYCU, a high-growth company with a great product, many happy customers, and a nearly limitless market opportunity. Every day, data becomes a more and more valuable commodity, fueling companies’ decisions about every aspect of their businesses. But that same data can become a liability if companies cannot safely store and access it across their hybrid multi-cloud environments. HYCU solves a huge problem in an increasingly cloud-first world.

Initially, we were intrigued by HYCU’s wildly popular product. For each cloud or on-premise environment, HYCU’s solution integrates with the underlying platform to make data backup and recovery faster, more reliable, and more secure. Then, HYCU offers an easy-to-use admin layer to manage backup and recovery across all on-premise servers and clouds via one unified dashboard. Today, its product supports several public and enterprise clouds including Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Nutanix, and VMWare, with AWS soon on the horizon.

Technology+Traction+Team: A Winning Combination

As we got to know the company, we furthermore developed great conviction that the HYCU team, comprised of seasoned technologists and go-to-market leaders who have successfully built global software companies, was uniquely suited to build the category-leader in this emerging space. HYCU’s founders have worked in the data protection industry for decades. CEO Simon Taylor was previously president of Comtrade Software. That’s where he met VP of Engineering Goran Garevski, who began building data protection platforms in the early 1990s and has since served as CTO or VP of engineering at multiple data management and storage companies. The two began working on the beginnings of HYCU while at Comtrade Software and HYCU will now be spun out of Comtrade as part of this Series A deal.

HYCU has been steadily building traction since 2017 and has signed over 2000 customers in 75 countries. The company will use the funding to rapidly expand hiring at its Boston headquarters and among its distributed workforce worldwide.

We’re thrilled to write the very first check into HYCU as a standalone company, alongside our good friend Theresia Gouw at Acrew Capital.

Welcome to the BCV family, HYCU!