Rewind, a startup that provides cloud-based data backup services for software-as-a-service applications, said today it has closed on a new $65 million round of funding.

New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners led the oversubscribed Series B round, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, FundFire, Inovia Capital, Ridge Ventures, ScaleUp Ventures and Union Ventures. Atlassian Ventures, the investment arm of Atlassian Corp. Plc, also made a strategic investment in the company as part of the round.

Rewind, owned and operated by Third Blink Software Inc., has created a “repeatable” product development process that enables companies to build and replicate cloud-based applications and their data across various cloud infrastructures.

The company’s backup-as-a-service offering comes with advanced features including unlimited storage and a support team, and can dynamically scale to handle increased loads as customer’s business needs change. It enables businesses to recover from any problem, including tiny data errors or massive data disasters, the company says. The service also has the ability to back up its customers’ data in multiple data centers around the globe to ensure it can meet their unique data privacy, security and compliance needs.

Rewind says its cloud backup services are urgently needed because of the intense popularity of SaaS tools in the enterprise. It says the average enterprise manages as many as 80 different SaaS apps at any given time, yet very few of those apps are fully backed up. Although most SaaS providers do back up their cloud infrastructure, they do not make account-level, business-critical information such as sales, marketing and financial data, available to users.

Rewind co-founder and Chief Executive Mike Potter told SiliconANGLE the lack of comprehensive SaaS backup services is a direct result of gaps in the “Shared Responsibility Model” followed by SaaS, infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service providers that outline where a cloud provider’s duty of care ends and the customer’s begins.

“Simply put, customers rent a SaaS company’s infrastructure, leveraging their technology to conduct business,” Potter said. “If you read the terms and conditions of most SaaS providers, they will aim to have their applications running 24/7. However, when it comes to the data and information that you create and upload; they will not guarantee that it will always be saved. The responsibility of ensuring data and business continuity is “shared” between SaaS providers and customers.”

Cloud backups for large software companies such as Salesforce.com Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. have existed for years, but the same is not true of smaller SaaS firms. Potter explained Rewind’s goal is to help small and medium-sized businesses that need protection for the smaller SaaS apps they use. “Their data is just as vital to run their businesses and it would be a significant blow if they could not recover it,” he said.

Potter said Rewind is trying to combat a widespread misconception that if data is in the cloud, then it will be there forever. He said it’s one that’s held even by seasoned technology professionals.

“In the last five years, we have seen just about every scenario imaginable when it comes to causes of data loss: people making mistakes, employees or contractors deleting data on purpose, third-party apps taking control and wiping databases,” he said. “One customer even told us about a cat that walked across their keyboard and deleted vital files.”

He acknowledged that some senior IT managers, DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers have an understanding of the issue, “but overall most businesses don’t understand the risk they are facing and that they are on the hook should anything go wrong,” he added.

Rewind’s message does appear to be getting across. Since it raised $15 million in a Series A funding round in January, the company has expanded its product with support for dozens of new applications and says it now backs up more than 53 billion data points in cloud-based SaaS apps such as BigCommerce, GitHub, QuickBooks Online, Shopify, Shopify Plus and Trello, for customers in more than 100 countries.

Insight Partners Operating Partner John True said he believes the dominance of cloud software in the modern business landscape means demand for cloud backup tools will continue to grow. “We see Rewind as a pillar of the cloud backup and recovery space,” he added.

Looking ahead, Rewind said it will use its new funding to speed up product development to cover more applications and try to raise awareness around the need to back up cloud and SaaS-based apps.

Image: Rewind