Acronis has announced a $147 miilion investment round led by global financial services giant Goldman Sachs.
The new funding turns Acronis into the latest vendor on the managed services landscape valued above $1 billion.
Best known for its BDR solutions, Acronis is in the early stages of a strategic push into the burgeoning security market. The company intends to use the additional money now at its disposal to expand its engineering teams in Singapore, Bulgaria, and Arizona; build additional data centers; bankroll acquisitions of other vendors; and accelerate business growth in North America through Acronis SCS, the independent public sector unit it announced in April.
“We are excited about Goldman Sachs’ investment,” said Acronis founder and CEO Serguei Beloussov, in a media statement. “In 2018, Acronis achieved 20% business growth, and in 2019 it is on track for over 30% growth with the Acronis Cyber Cloud business growing by over 100%. Recently we announced the Acronis Cyber Platform, enabling third-parties to customize, extend, and integrate our cyber protection solutions to the needs of their customers and partners. The investment round led by Goldman Sachs will help us to fast-track the product development through acquisitions of companies and additional resources, and accelerate the growth.”
Global spending on managed services is set to grow at a 9.3% CAGR through 2023 to $282 billion, according to MarketsandMarkets. That huge sum has private equity investors like Thoma Bravo, Insight Venture Partners, and Vista Equity Partners snapping up makers of RMM, PSA, BDR, and other solutions used by managed service providers.
Goldman Sachs is the second recent Wall Street heavyweight to get in on that trend. In May, TPG, a private equity firm with $103 billion in assets under management and stakes in Box, AirBnB, Spotify, and Uber, participated in a $500 million investment round in managed services software maker Kaseya. That transaction raised Kaseya’s market value to $2.25 billion.
Goldman’s investment in Acronis was engineered by its Goldman Sachs Growth Equity unit, which specializes in “growth stage and technology-driven companies.” GS Growth, as it’s also known, currently has security awareness vendor KnowBe4 and CRM vendor Keap (formerly Infusionsoft), among others familiar to channel pros, in its portfolio. Past investments include Citrix, Qualcomm, Riverbed, and VMware.
“We are excited to invest in Acronis at this stage of rapid growth,” said Holger Staude, vice president GS Growth, in prepared remarks. “The traditional backup and data protection market is changing due to an innovative solution delivered efficiently by Acronis Cyber Protection through a vast channel of service providers.”
Founded in 2003, Acronis currently has over 1,400 employees in 18 countries. Its software is used by 5 million consumers and 500,000 businesses worldwide, and is sold by some 50,000 partners and service providers in over 150 countries.
The company is currently in the midst of reinventing itself as a “cyber protection” vendor offering both backup and security software. Recent steps in that transition include the introduction last month of a cyber services portfolio with offerings for end user security awareness training, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and incident response planning. Total Protect, a new cybersecurity software suite, is set to debut officially at the vendor’s first annual Global Cyber Summit in Miami next month.
