OwnBackup grabs $7.5M Series B investment for SaaS data backup service

One of the great advantages of the cloud is that your vendor is supposed to take care of all the hard management bits for you — including backup. While that’s true for the most part, the vendor can’t help you recover data if one of your employees makes an error that results in data loss or corruption.

That’s where OwnBackup comes in. It’s a backup service for SaaS applications like Salesforce.com, and today it announced a $7.5 million Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners. Existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Oryzn Capital and Salesforce Ventures also chipped in.

OwnBackup is also working on backup and recovery tools for ServiceNow and Slack data, and has more ambitious plans to back up other types of SaaS data over time. CEO Sam Gutmann says in all instances the company is simply taking advantage of the SaaS vendors’ open APIs and tuning them to deal with data backup and recovery.

To get up and running with OwnBackup you simply sign up, then sign into the service you wish to back up using your company’s admin credentials. Once that’s done, the product begins backing up almost immediately, he said.

The real value of the product, of course, is when something goes wrong. You can take a snapshot of the current database and compare it with a backup from a certain point in time, and decide which elements you want to recover. In most cases, you are only recovering a portion of the data that’s been lost or corrupted, not the entire database, according to Gutmann.

Photo: OwnBackup

For example, he told the story of one customer who came back from a trade show with 1,000 new leads, cleaned them up, put them in a marketing automation platform and synced them to Salesforce, at which point he unknowingly over-wrote all the leads from last year’s trade show.

It took a few days to figure out the error, and by that time people had been updating their client information in Salesforce. They certainly didn’t want to overwrite all of that, so they simply rolled back to the day they overwrote the leads from last year and recovered just that data, saving the day, while leaving everything else intact.

Gutmann says they plan to spend some of the new cash expanding the product set, while continuing to build out the sales and marketing arm. The company currently has 500 paying customers and 30 employees divided between the corporate offices in Fort Lee, New Jersey and the R&D arm in Tel Aviv, Israel.