Calamu raises $16.5M to enhance its virtual data harbor

Today, virtual data harbor provider Calamu announced that it had raised $16.5 million as part of a series A funding round. 

The solution is designed to enable enterprises to store data in a multicloud environment that fragments stored information across multiple storage locations, which means that there’s no central resource for an attacker to target with ransomware.

This approach provides technical decision-makers with a tool they can use to thwart not just traditional ransomware attacks, but also ransomware 2.0, double and triple extortion attempts with multicloud data protection capabilities. 

A new answer to ransomware 2.0? 

Ransomware threats have remained a constant concern for organizations over the past few years, not due just to the high volume of new strains, but the ineffectiveness of existing security solutions to address zero-day threats. 

In fact, hackers targeted 80% of organizations with ransomware attacks in 2021, andmore than 60% of victims paid the ransom. 

Calamu’s funding announcement comes as organizations require new solutions to protect their data from encryption and exfiltration whether it’s stored on-premises or in the cloud. 

“Calamu solves two major problems within the enterprise: cybersecurity and regulatory compliance. Data that has been ‘Calamu’d’ has the capability to completely self-heal from a cyberattack,” said Calamu’s CEO Paul Lewis in an interview. 

“Not only does the data in the data harbor self-heal, we also eliminate the risk of double or triple extortion because any exfiltrated data is by design incomplete, and completely useless to the attacker,” he said.

Virtual data harbors move into the data protection market

Calamu is part of the global data protection as a service market, which researchers valued at $7.61 billion in 2020 and expect to reach $18.96 billion by 2026, as more enterprises seek to minimize the risks of costly data breaches.

The company is competing with several providers in the market, including Cloudian, which offers a ransomware-protection-as-a-service solution; it enables organizations to create copies of their data that they can replicate to a second Cloudian site or deep archive storage solution like AWS Glacier.

Cloudian has raised $198.6 million to date, according to Crunchbase. 

Another competitor is Rubrik, a ransomware protection solution that stores data so that ransomware actors can access or modify backups, which achieved a valuation of $4 billion following Microsoft’s investment last year. 

However, Lewis argues that Calamu’s scalability is what differentiates it from competitors. “Calamu was designed and built by cybersecurity experts with a focus on extreme data protection. Our platform is almost infinitely scalable, and works with many major cloud vendors in addition to on-premise storage providers,” he said. 

The funding round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, to enhance its flagship product and expand its team.