How an average student from a middle-class family built a Rs 700 crore annual recurring revenue IT company
By | Anvi Mehta | www.theweekendleader.com
When Pune-boy Milind Borate passed out of school, he least aspired to become an IT entrepreneur one day, leave alone taking his firm to the number one position in the data management sector. Otherwise would he have enrolled for a humble diploma course in engineering?
Well, he later went to study at IIT-Bombay, and also steered the company he co-founded, Druva, to achieve an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of nearly US$ 100 million – which is close to Rs 700 crore – last year. The pioneering IT startup that turned data management into a service ahead of others employs 700 persons now, just 12 years after its inception.
“We got recognised by Gartner (World’s leading research and advisory company) as the number one data protection and recovery product in 2013-14,” says Borate, 46, who founded Druva along with two other software programmers, Jaspreet Singh and Ramani Kothandaraman, in 2007.
A partner of Amazon Web Services (AWS), they currently work with 38 of the Fortune 500 companies and are backed by Sequoia Capital, Riverwood Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Tenaya Capital, among others. Druva has so far raised $200 million in funding, with the last round of $ 80 million in August 2017.
