Kasten Raises $14M Series A Led By Insight Partners

We are very excited to announce that Kasten, the market leader for cloud-native data management, has closed a $14M Series A led by Insight Partners.

Being early (2015!) production users of Kubernetes, Vaibhav, my co-founder, and I, have personally experienced the challenges our enterprise customers are facing as they embark on their cloud and container transformation journey. As complex applications enter production, they have seen significant Day 2 challenges emerge when running stateful applications at scale, on multiple clusters, on multiple clouds, and with multiple relational and NoSQL data services. In particular, their most pressing problems today revolve around backup and disaster recovery, and application mobility. We founded Kasten to tackle these important data management problems so that our customers would not have to worry about them.

Today, K10, our data management platform purpose-built for Kubernetes, has already started delivering on our vision. It enables enterprises to meet business continuity and compliance requirements around stateful cloud-native applications running on public and private Kubernetes deployments at scale. K10 also provides enterprise IT and DevOps teams with much needed operational discipline and peace of mind when handling use cases around backup and recovery, cloud migration, and disaster recovery.

Building K10 was not just about refactoring or reimplementing existing technology in a radically different world. Instead, we took this opportunity to fundamentally reimagine what an enterprise data management platform would look like if it was built from the ground-up with the cloud-native paradigms that developers have fallen in love with. This meant focusing on the following:

• Unique Application-Centric Vision: We fundamentally believe that focusing on the application, and treating it as the operational unit, is the only sane way of balancing the needs of operations and development teams in a cloud-native environment. Given the application focus of not just these groups but also Kubernetes’s design philosophy, any data management solution needs to work with an entire application and not just the infrastructure or storage layers. This allow operations teams to scale by ensuring business policy compliance at the application level instead of having to think about the hundreds of components that make up a modern app. At the same time, working with the application gives developers power and control when needed without slowing them down when they don’t.

• Enterprise Readiness: People often assume that data management revolves around the mechanics of capturing and storing data but this, while important, is only a small piece of the puzzle. Instead, a production-ready data management solution needs to deliver a number of operations-specific features, including everything from global visibility, monitoring, alerting, and auditing, to features such as compliance, RBAC, and deep data service integration. Further, it means having these features work at scale, not just across diverse environments, but also with PBs of data to optimize and deduplicate.

• Customer-Centric Product Focus: In a highly-opinionated cloud-native ecosystem, we are also firm believers in meeting the customers where they are today. This means supporting customers on whatever cloud they select (private, public, hybrid), giving them the option of picking the best storage system in the given cloud without requiring yet another new storage system, and supporting all the diverse data services they might be running within their cloud-native infrastructure. This also includes supporting containerized applications that might not be fully cloud-native yet, hiding complexity and supporting groups new to Kubernetes with easy-to-use workflows, and helping operators deal with the scale challenges they are facing today.

Having raised over $17M to date, we will be rapidly growing the team (yes, we are hiring!) including setting up a new engineering office in Salt Lake City, Utah, to better serve you. Expect even more from us in terms of new features and how quickly we ship them, increased depth to support your most complicated workflows in an easy-to-use manner, and the deep customer focus and support you have learned to expect from us. I fully I believe that we have built the best product in the market, and we will continue to extend this lead.

As a part of this round, we are also excited to bring aboard Insight Partner’s Mike Triplett. Mike’s deep focus on infrastructure and enterprise software companies, including a number of investments in the data protection and management space, is going to be invaluable as we grow the company. We are thrilled to have him in our corner! We would also be remiss if we didn’t thank our amazing team (you rock!), our wonderful customers, and all our existing investors and advisors, including the indomitable Amarjit Gill. Kasten would not be here today without their support.

Finally, I know I speak for the entire Kasten team when I say that we are extremely excited as we start this next chapter of our journey. There is so much more to come and so, stay tuned! 🚀

Niraj Tolia, CEO and Co-Founder
@nirajtolia

P.S. You can try out K10, our flagship product, risk free and at zero-cost today. Go, give it a try!