A team of founders who sold their last company to Amazon to build a new business within AWS is setting out to reinvent the tricky business of backing up an organization’s cloud infrastructure. Today, Eon — as their new startup is called — is coming out of stealth with a product, a set of customers, full three rounds of funding totalling $127 million, and a $750 million (post-money valuation).
Specifically, Eon — which was founded in Israel and New York only in January 2024 — has raised a Sequoia-led $20 million Seed (with Vine Ventures, Meron Capital, and Eight Roads participating; a Lightspeed Venture Partners-led $30 million Series A (Sheva participating too); and a Greenoaks-led $77 million Series B (Quiet Ventures also participating).
Infrastructure backup has been a part and parcel of enterprise IT for a number of years, going back to the days when most businesses were built around on-premises server architecture, software was installed through floppy disks, and clouds referred only to what you saw in the sky outside your office window.
But as Ofir Ehrlich, the CEO of Eon, describes it, what passed for backup in those days has not translated well enough to the architecture of the modern cloud environment because the need has become more complex. Smaller customers can have hundreds of terabytes of data stored with a single cloud provider, with the total amount of data exceeding hundreds of petabytes when considering a full network. The full list of assets is complex, too: it will cover not just active apps, but data that is not used everyday (“cold storage”) yet still needs to be accessed, network appliances, edge devices, and more.
Customers have giant budgets in the billions dedicated to infrastructure — a figure projected to reach $838 billion by 2034 — and growing budgets related to backup efforts because of the size of that infrastructure, but also the increasing cybersecurity risks. It is “driven by both internal compliance — what the organization thinks they need to do in order to retain things — and external compliance,” Ehrlich said. He estimated that about 10-30% of infrastructure budgets are spent on backup.
But saying that all of this needs to be addressed is easier said than done, and perhaps until now more easily identified than actually executed.
Ehrlich, along with Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi, previously had founded a recovery service startup called CloudEndure, which Amazon acquired for around $250 million in 2019 to build out its own product within AWS. Ehrlich believed they had everything solved in those days, and their focus on infrastructure backup at Eon came out of their humbling experiences of reality.
Ehrlich recounted that when they were at AWS, he heard about one of the company’s key customers facing a massive ransomware attack. (Ehrlich said he could not name the company, as he also declined to name Eon’s current customers.)
“‘Great,’ I said to myself. ‘This [ransomware attack] is going to be an amazing success story for AWS!’” No, he didn’t mean that he was happy about the attack but, “I knew they were fully protected as much as anyone could be,” he said in an interview.
So they called them up to double check everything was okay. And of course… it was not.
The disaster recovery service that AWS provided covered just what Ehrlich called “the top level” of data, and he’d assumed that with all the backup vendors in the market, the customer would have had everything else covered. “Apparently, they had a big drift.” Meaning: over the years between setting up backup services and that ransomware attack, the customer had changed around many things, closed down some apps, opened others, and data had moved.
Eon does not go into deep detail about how it approaches solving this problem today, but as the CEO describes it, it’s a mix of technical expertise, product experience to understand how data is stored and accessed int he cloud, and a “breakthrough” in the form a what he said was “a novel approach to storage and secondary storage,” which lets Eon observe and understand the bigger infrastructure picture in an efficient way, without having to write and rewrite data continuously. It has filed a number of patents on the method, he said.
“In an industry where file restoration can take weeks, Eon’s novel backup solution pinpoints data instantly, saving time, money, and compliance headaches for customers,” said Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital, in a statement. “With a world-class team led by cloud pioneers Ofir, Gonen, and Ron – Eon is bringing the next generation of cloud backup management to market.”