Okta Ventures Invests in HYCU and Data Protection

BOSTON — The data protection provider HYCU is now being backed by Okta Ventures. 

HYCU received the “strategic investment” from Okta Venture as an extension of HYCU’s $53 million Series B financing round, according to HYCU this month.

The Series B round, announced this June, was led by Acrew Capital, and other investors included Bain Capital Ventures, Cisco Investments, and Atlassian Ventures.  

During the past year, HYCU, which is focused on data backup, has raised $140 million in venture funding.

HYCU will also collaborate with Okta on technology, with plans to connect Protégé, HYCU’s data protection-as-a-service platform, with Okta. Okta is an identity management platform that offers single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and a universal directory. 

Boston-based HYCU serves thousands of customers globally and reports a net promoter score of 91. 

HYCU was also named a visionary in the 2022 Gartner “Magic Quadrant” for enterprise backup and recovery software solutions. 

Solving “complex challenges”

Combining Okta’s solutions with HYCU’s Protégé platform “ensures data is available and protected regardless of location,” said Simon Taylor, founder and CEO, HYCU. 

The HYCU team is “thrilled to welcome Okta Ventures as an investor and to collaborate with Okta and the power of their industry-leading platform to provide a secure, easy to use, and intuitive data protection solution for enterprise users around the world,” Taylor said.

Okta Ventures believes in “investing in companies that build cutting-edge technologies to solve complex challenges and keep the world safer,” said Austin Arensberg, director of Okta Ventures. 

HYCU is working to make data accessible to enterprises while also helping them protect it. 

“Data is the lifeblood of any organization, and without reliable access to data, many of the items we take for granted would not be possible, from processing a payment transaction to performing a life-saving medical procedure,” Arensberg said. “We are thrilled to be a part of their journey.”

Growth of backup and recovery market 

The global data backup and recovery market is expected to grow from $9.69 billion in 2021 to $22.22 billion in 2030, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9.8%, according to Reports and Data.

North America is expected to be the largest revenue market for service backup, media storage backup, and email backup. The researchers predict that large enterprises will have a larger market share than small and medium enterprises during the forecast period.

Learn more about the data recovery market. 

Growth of identity management market 

The global identity and access management market is expected to increase from $13.41 billion in 2021 to $34.52 billion in 2028, at compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.5%, according to a report by Fortune Business Insights. The driving factors of the market growth are increasing security concerns and cybercrime and enterprise regulatory compliance needs, the report says. 

Managing business application access and user identities is critical to enterprise security, because it decreases opportunities for attackers to gain unauthorized access and laterally move through systems. 

Read more about the identity and access management market.