Eon raises $300M Series D at $4B valuation to turn cloud backups into AI-ready data lakes

Uh, let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel graded minis, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concier service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. That's right. Um, our next guest is already in the reream waiting room. We have the founder of

Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

I'm I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Thanks for very excited as well. We wanted to get you on uh last week, but we were on the road. Uh, and yeah, very excited to chat.

Thank you very much.

Introduce yourself, introduce the company. We'd love to get uh you know how you're positioning it and then I want to go into the funding round and some of the implications of this but uh kick it off with a little bit of an introduction for us.

So sounds great. As always I always start by saying my name is Ofair. I'm married to wonderful Julian father to Rome. Objectively cutest baby ever born.

Wow. That's a great intro. I love it. [laughter]

These are the important stuff. Less important stuff. I I started a few companies before. Actually four companies to be exact. Wow. Most recent one was a company called Cloud and Do which we sold to Amazon on January of 2019. Grew the business to a billion dollar business uh doing migration and disaster recovery to the cloud.

Let's give it up for migration and disaster recovery in the cloud doesn't get enough doesn't get enough credit. It does not get enough credit. That's right.

I agree. I'm actually this I was this crazy guy who really love data data data regression data protection. We we lived this all so long and both me and my co-founders and while we were there we saw an opportunity that we just couldn't resist all those companies really moving to the cloud especially around co

and and later on and all the incumbents in our space uh were born on premises. So we decided to start a company in cloud backup.

You could say cloud backup isn't it solar like in 1981.

Yeah. Well, we figure out that as companies move to the cloud become very significant, they have a very big big problem actually managing their data. Imagine the secondary storage backups are like tapes. These are companies storing their most precious data for a very long time and they can't access that.

So, we started as a backup company. I said, I'm this crazy person starting a non-AI company in an AI world.

Yeah.

But then you know what? It hit me. AI is such a strong compelling event with just strong tailwinds that we just had.

I mean, look at the Seagate and Western Digital stocks. They're through the roof this year. It's crazy.

And it makes sense because everyone's going to need to store a lot more data. Everyone's creating so much more data.

So much data created all the time. And you always data. And I don't know who's going to win the comput wars.

Yeah. Yeah.

Open AI, anthropic, a data brick, snowflake in any area. What I do know, no matter what's going to happen,

yeah,

data is going to be the enterprise mode. Yeah.

And we are here to help them allocate this data. We're automating cloud backups. Sounds boring, right?

Making it into useful, accessible assets, data links.

So you can back up all your data in a very seamless, easy way, but then use it

for example to train models. That's all the hype, right?

And analytics, NBI. Wait, so no, so no tapes. It's on drives.

No tapes on tapes as it seems. We're software only solution. Okay.

Only in the cloud, cloud born. This is what we've been doing.

Yeah.

On on a public cloud or on your own cloud because I imagine that one of the benefits of backups and one of the one of the key things that people want to buy when they're backing up data is, hey, I'm I'm already tied to AWS. I don't want everything on AWS. I want I want security in case AWS goes down. I want to back up somewhere else. How are you thinking about that?

Perfect.

So, and we've seen quite a few outages in last few weeks, right? And what we're saying with democratizing your data, it's your data,

whether it's AWS, Azure, and GCP, great clouds or other clouds.

We're making sure you can extract the data,

make it portable between clouds, making accessible, performant,

browsable, and searchable. You can search and browse all of your data and all of your history immediately. And because we're building our own software stack, software only, it's not going to cost you a dime. It's actually cheaper than building it on your own or using existing cloud technologies to do that. So we're trying to make sure that we make it a we we give you an easy button as a customer to just enable the use of all of your data, make it accessible to if you want to run snowflake or data bricks or red shift or bigquery or anything that you want on your data, that's great. We are here to make sure that you enable to do it on all of the data that you have and all of the data that you had in the past.

But how could you possibly be cheaper than the big hyperscalers, the the the big public clouds? I imagine that you know Microsoft, GCP, Azure, AWS, like they're buying so many Cay drives, so many Western Digital drives. Uh how can you possibly compete on price?

That's an unbelievable question. Actually, I don't want to just win on price. I just want to make it easy for you. So what we're doing even though we're still in the cloud using cloud building blocks, object storage, GCS, S3, Azure blobs, etc. Got it.

We're building in a very different way. Sure.

And actually building a more more efficient, it's called version of cloud snapshots. Got it.

That purposely built for backup and data retrieval.

Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh take us through the news. What's the funding news? I want to ring the gong for a data storage company. Thank you very much. And I'm also very excited. So we raised $500 million in total. $300 million just in this round. Really excited. Led by Elad Gil with not only an amazing investor, he's also an amazing human being.

Yeah.

And we we got

What's it like? What's it like being what's it like being a fly on the wall when you and Allah get together and talk about uh data?

Well, Elad is simply unbelievable. you know, he's one of the most humble people I've met and at the same time brilliant, brilliant and so wellconnected. I don't think I've ever seen an investor that everyone likes so much. And I have the privilege to choose amazing investor. I have Seoia and Lightseed and Greenox and Bond Capital and and likes of Omry Kaspi who are just amazing amazing investors. And Eladgil is is very unique. Actually, I so we got preempted by 16 VCs and I so wanted it to be a lad really and when a lad when a lad wanted said I'm going to lead my year round I was in New York he flew from San Francisco he came to my office he basically wouldn't leave until I signed and to be honest I really really want to do that because I got to know the the person not just the investor in the last few months and and year he he put a small check in a previous found and honestly we just fell in love. Not just myself, my other co-ounders as well.

So

that's incredible.

When we had the chance, we had to do it.

That's and really really happy, excited about it.

You wrote the book on high growth.

You did.

I know. I know. And

absolutely. Absolutely. And I'm I'm really thrilled. We have now a lot of capital in a time when we can we can now plan ahead. We don't think need to think about the macro. We don't need to think whether everything's going to continue to be rainbows and unicorns. Do we going to have a a a downturn soon?

Who knows? But we know we can build a strong fundamental business

that's going to be for a very long time.

This is hilarious. But it's a great take and it's a great way to build your company and your business so that you can take advantage of these tailwinds but also survive the headwinds and uh congratulations to you. Great. This is this is what we need.

This is a

Exactly. We're here for a long time.

Yeah.

Yes.

Forever. Forever. Is this your Do you want this to be You've done four companies prior to this. Do you want this to be the last one? You You just want to

just

Last one.

Last one.

All the way to the IPO and beyond.

Yes. Yes.

That's my goal.

Fantastic.

Incredible. You have incredible energy. I'm excited to uh follow uh follow your journey and you're welcome on the show anytime.

Thank you so much for coming.

Thank you very much. I'm really excited. I love your showing. Thank you very much. I'm going to get back and tune to that. Thank you. [laughter]

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Cheers.

Goodbye. Uh that that is worthy and valuable. We were debating uh what is worthy and valuable. That feels like a company. That's the worthy and valuable company of San Francisco.

He's keeping What do you need to do? I