A team of founders who sold their last company to Amazon to build a new unit within AWS is setting out to reinvent the tricky business of backing up organizations’ cloud infrastructure. Now, Eon is coming out of stealth with a product, a set of customers, three rounds of funding totaling $127 million, and a $750 million post-money valuation.
Specifically, Eon has raised a Sequoia-led $20 million Seed (with Vine Ventures, Meron Capital, and Eight Roads participating); a Lightspeed Venture Partners-led $30 million Series A (with venture firm Sheva participating); and a Greenoaks-led $77 million Series B (with Quiet Ventures also participating). The company was founded in Israel and New York, and only started operations in January 2024.
Infrastructure backup has been a part of enterprise IT for a long time, going back to when most businesses ran on-premises server architecture, installed software through floppy disks, and clouds referred only to what you saw in the sky outside.
But as Ofir Ehrlich, the CEO of Eon, describes it, what passed for backup in those days has not translated well enough to the architecture of the modern cloud environment because the needs have become more complex. Smaller customers can have hundreds of terabytes of data stored with a single cloud provider, and the total amount of data can exceed hundreds of petabytes when considering a full network. The full list of assets is complex, too, covering not just active apps, but data that is not used everyday (“cold storage”) yet still needs to be accessed, as well as network appliances, edge devices and more.
Companies dedicate billions to infrastructure — a figure projected to reach $838 billion by 2034 — and are increasing budgets for backup efforts because of the size of their infrastructure as well as increasing cybersecurity risks. That is “driven by both internal compliance — what the organization thinks they need to do in order to retain things — and external compliance,” Ehrlich said. He estimated that about 10% to 30% of infrastructure budgets are spent on backup.
But addressing all of this is easier said than done, and perhaps until now, more easily identified than actually executed.
Ehrlich, along with Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi, previously founded a recovery service startup called CloudEndure, which Amazon acquired for around $250 million in 2019 to build its own product within AWS. Ehrlich believed they had everything solved in those days, and their focus on infrastructure backup at Eon came out of their humbling experiences of reality.
Ehrlich recounted that when they were at AWS, he heard about one of the company’s key customers facing a massive ransomware attack. (Ehrlich would not name the company, and he also declined to name Eon’s current customers.)
“‘Great,’ I said to myself. ‘This [ransomware attack] is going to be an amazing success story for AWS!’” No, he didn’t mean that he was happy about the attack, but “I knew they were fully protected as much as anyone could be,” he said in an interview.
So his team called that customer up to double-check everything was okay. And of course… it was not.
The disaster recovery service that AWS provided covered only “the top level” of data, Ehrlich said, and he’d assumed that with all the backup vendors in the market, the customer would have had everything else covered. “Apparently, they had a big drift.” Meaning: Over the years between setting up backup services and that ransomware attack, the customer had changed many things, closed down some apps, opened others, and data had moved.
Eon did not go into detail about how it approaches solving this problem today. But per Ehrlich, it’s a mix of technical expertise, product experience, and a “breakthrough” in the form of “a novel approach to storage and secondary storage.” That lets Eon observe and understand the bigger infrastructure picture in an efficient way without having to write and rewrite data continuously. It has filed a number of patents on the method, he said.
“In an industry where file restoration can take weeks, Eon’s novel backup solution pinpoints data instantly, saving time, money, and compliance headaches for customers,” said Shaun Maguire, partner at Sequoia Capital, in a statement. “With a world-class team led by cloud pioneers Ofir, Gonen, and Ron, Eon is bringing the next generation of cloud backup management to market.”