Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman
Backblaze, the 5-year-old company that backs up everything on your PC for $ 5 per month, has snagged $ 5 million in funding from TMT Investments, an investment house out of the U.K.
San Mateo, Calif.-based Backblaze will use the money to staff up and expand its marketing efforts — and attack the masses of people who still do not back up their computers, CEO Gleb Budman said in a recent interview. Backblaze competes most directly with Mozy, now owned by EMC and Carbonite.
Taking outside money was not done lightly. The company was bootstrapped for its first year and a half and then it took in $ 390,000 in seed money. The company has been profitable since the early days, Budman said.
“When we started we explicitly didn’t want venture funding for a few reasons — we worried that going through the process would ge distracting and we worried about handing off too much control and equity and mostly we worried about the impact on our culture,” Budman said
Now, with five years under its belt and 16 employees, he feels the culture is set and the time is right to fund more growth. The company will remain stingy — it will take half of the funding now and the other half in a year. take the money in two distributions, one now and in a year.
“We run our own cloud, we do our own support. For first few years we killed ourselves. We were lean and crazy and there was definitely a risk of burn out. Now we’re at good place. We all work hard, but at a marathon pace, not a sprint,” he said.
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