Druva: Pivoting into a Unicorn
Jaspreet Singh — Founder and CEO
• How to stay relevant for your customers
• Blending sales with engineering to build a winning culture
• Importance of discipline in achieving sustainable growth
The Indian start-up ecosystem has had a spectacular 2019–20 with seven startups joining the much-coveted unicorn club of the country. While each unicorn is a separate success story, businesses in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry — Druva, Zoho, Freshworks, and Icertis — had a larger impact on this feat, thanks to a multitude of challenges in the sector.
Druva was started in 2008 by Milind Borate, Ramani Kothandaraman, and Jaspreet Singh, to address the need to manage data in a simple and cost-efficient manner. With focused efforts, the B2B tech now operates across three continents and was India’s first SaaS “Unicorn” in June 2019.
A B2B SaaS company, Druva manages and protects data for companies who have partially or fully migrated to the cloud. It already counts large corporations including Pfizer, Flex, Marriott, Hitachi, and NASA among its clients. And with Gartner predicting that by 2025, 80 percent of enterprises would migrate entirely to the cloud and close their on-premises data centers, the future of Druva looks bright as a star.
However, this journey hasn’t been any less adventurous for the team at Druva.
A Pivotal Journey:
Jaspreet Singh was our guest on the Building It Up with Bertelsmann podcast last year, where he shared the three major pivots around which the company’s growth resonates. While starting-up the team faced a lot of challenges as the market for high-end software products from an Indian company, was very limited so they had to scale down and re-examine their product and consider building global enterprise software. They then pivoted to create an endpoint backup product, the first version of which was released in 2009.
Back then, as an increasing number of employees migrated to mobile devices, endpoint backup was becoming important. Organizations needed to not only protect on-premise data but also during their employee’s travel. Products available back then were mostly focused on anti-virus and leakage protection and hardly anyone focused on endpoint backup.
In 2012, when Druva received its series A funding from Sequoia Capital, it shifted its headquarters to Sunnywale, California. With the move, it chose to look and feel more like a regular Silicon Valley company, underplaying its Indian roots. It later went on to set up subsidiaries in Japan and Germany and has opened offices in the UK, Australia, and Singapore ever since. About 65% of its enterprise customers are in the Americas, 25% in Europe and the Middle East, and 10% in the Asia Pacific region. This has given Druva a global brand image.
In order to create a more agile, and efficient data management environment, Druva unveiled Druva Cloud Platform in December of 2016 to accelerate the full enterprise cloud-first ecosystem with Its open architecture and APIs enabling businesses and partners to extract greater value from stored data for solving information management challenges.
Therefore, while Druva had started out as a software company in the cloud backup market and in 2013, it decided to let go of revenue-bearing customers and pivot to a subscription model, relaunching Druva as a Cloud SaaS company. This aligned with the company’s destined trajectory to be India’s first SaaS product unicorn.
“As the appetite for cloud evolved, we too evolved over-time and placed an anchor on cloud and built various business cases around data protection and management” Jaspreet added.
Role of AGILE Culture in a Unicorn:
To be a unicorn is no cakewalk and each unicorn today has its own story with a list of features that worked in their favour. According to a Comparably report, a company’s success may depend more on company culture than money.
For example — At Slack, which is the world’s fastest-growing company, the importance of working hard is recognized but so is the importance of going home. In fact, “Work Hard and Go Home” is a notable company mantra which aims to maximize its employees 6–8 hour of productivity window during the day. Apart from this the company also focuses on building internal voices which translates into an external and its employee are renowned to be empathetic.
Harsh Jain of Dream11 also lays immense importance of the company’s DOPUT culture in helping them achieve some of the biggest feats. Check out other insights by Harsh here.
When we spoke to Jaspreet, he emphasized how Druva’s culture revolves around agility and that the key to success lies in assembling a team that believes in the core values of a startup. He is also a strong advocate of hiring people who can work on building a knowledge base rather than an information base.
Keeping an Arjuna’s eye on IPO
Having scaled their company into a unicorn, with the help of an agile team culture and multiple pivots, IPO seems to be the way forward for Druva. For the company, growth remains the priority as it works towards deepening its presence in the South Asian market, and IPO may help it find accelerated growth in the market.
Going Public can unlock a new financial door as public companies can get better rates when raising debt. Further, it creates a liquidity event that can help investors and employees to cash out as well as for the company to pay off existing debts. Beyond that, an IPO also generates significant publicity and business opportunities for the company.
However, there have been many recent examples of high-profile companies such as Snap Inc., WeWork, etc that did not achieve the best from their IPO.
Snap Inc (SNAP), best known for its flagship product Snapchat raised $3.4 billion in March 2017. Despite an initial surge above its $17 IPO price, the stock struggled to hold onto those gains. Snap reported a disappointing user growth in its first quarterly report as a public company and later went onto settle for $187.5 million in January 2020.
Although going public is a big decision and a combination of macro and micro factors come into play before in any company goes public, Jaspreet believes that utmost discipline and preparation is the key to a successful IPO.
We at Bertelsmann India Investment wish Jaspreet and his team at Druva all the very best! Tune in here to watch our full conversation.
