The Importance of Getting Your ZZZs; IVP Adds Zerto to the Portfolio

By Sandy Miller, James Newell and Alex Lim

IVP has an inside joke about our preternatural ability to find high potential companies that start with the letter Z. In recent years we’ve backed Zynga, Zendesk, Zenefits, Ziprecruiter and ZEFR and are proud to announce that Zerto, the world’s leading provider of disaster recovery software for virtualized and cloud environments, is the newest addition to our portfolio. Zerto gives IT professionals unparalleled flexibility and scalability and most importantly, allows them to sleep at night knowing that their mission critical data center infrastructure is fully protected. After all, IVP isn’t the only one who need their ZZZs…

For those of you who don’t already know IVP, we’re a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. We’ve had 103 IPOs in our firm’s 35+ year history and partner with truly disruptive technology companies in both enterprise and consumer IT. In recent years we’ve backed high profile companies such as AppDynamics, Domo, Dropbox, GitHub, Slack, Snapchat, Tanium and Twitter.

So why is IVP so excited to add Zerto to the portfolio (beyond our history of success with the letter Z)?

A Huge Market Growing in Size and Complexity

According to Gartner, replication and backup is a $10+ Billion market that is growing double digit percentage annually. Enterprises are swimming in mission-critical “big data”, and industry specific technologies such as electronic health record (EHR) software while virtualization and hybrid cloud deployments make existing disaster recovery solutions unworkable. Only Zerto has responded to this software defined paradigm shift to solve a complex task previously constrained by physical technologies. Zerto moves data and application protection and replication into the virtual layer, working “across the aisle” to connect disparate technologies (i.e. vSphere and Hyper-V) for the benefit of IT and business leaders. Additionally, Zerto provides the ability to build infrastructures that best suit business needs using private, hybrid, or public clouds such as AWS to make IT organizations more agile in supporting changing business needs.

Equally noteworthy, many leading service providers are powering their Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings with Zerto’s Virtual Replication. DRaaS is rapidly emerging and represents an additional $2+ Billion in addressable market for Zerto.

Exceptional Management Team & Board

Zerto was founded by a team of storage industry veterans in 2009 and is led by its cofounder and CEO, Ziv Kedem. Ziv is an alumni of Israel’s highly prestigious Talpiot program and previously cofounded Kashya, which was acquired by EMC in 2006. Ziv and Oded Kedem, his cofounder at Zerto, have built a highly capable team across all functional areas. Zerto is also backed by an outstanding group of investors including Battery Ventures, US Venture Partners, 83North, RTP, Harmony Partners, and Access Industries/Claltech and a board including storage industry luminary, Mark Leslie, whose distinguished career has included involvement with Veritas, Netapp, Nutanix and Pure Storage, among many others.

2,200 (and Counting) Delighted Customers

There is simply no better way to understand the potential of a technology company than spending extensive time with customers understanding their experiences and interactions with a company. After speaking with several of Zerto’s 2,200 customers, channel partners and resellers, the verdict was clear. Zerto is delighting customers across 5 continents with a highly differentiated technology that cannot be replicated by competitive technologies.

A Unique Hypervisor Based Approach to Replication

Traditional storage-based disaster recovery solutions were architected for a time when applications ran on bare metal, not Virtual Machines. Replication happened at the storage level and required an identical parallel storage array for disaster recovery. This created massive hardware expenses and management complexity, and very few enterprises could justify the expense of protecting some of their very important infrastructure. But by moving replication into the hypervisor, Zerto is able to provide the lowest RPO/RTO (a measure of potential data loss) in the industry while giving unprecedented management control and dead-simple failover testing. This hypervisor based approach is so unique and powerful that some customers have started using Zerto as a migration tool to seamlessly move VMs from data center to data center and cloud to cloud. Zerto has solved incredible technical hurdles to support multiple hypervisors and multiple clouds and be completely storage-array agnostic. Israel is home to some of the world’s most exceptional technologists, and Zerto’s Virtual Replication is one more obvious example.

Sandy Miller is a General Partner at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. James Newell is a Vice President and Alex Lim is an Associate at IVP.