Acronis has concluded a US$250 million ($334 mil) funding round from CVC Capital Partners VII and other investors to accelerate its growth, bringing its valuation to more than US$2.5 billion.
The Singapore-based cyber protection solutions provider will use the funds to further develop and expand its product portfolio. One such product is the Acronis Cyber Protect, which natively integrates cybersecurity, data protection and management to protect endpoints, systems and data.
Additionally, the company intends to expand its partner networks to help more customers enhance their cyber security posture.
To do so, Acronis will expand its global sales, partner account management, and partner success teams. It also plans to double the number of its engineers globally over the next three years, up from the 1,000 engineers today for its research and development centres in Bulgaria, Israel, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States, Stas Protassov, Acronis co-founder & Technology President, shares with The Edge Singapore.
“With this additional funding, we will accelerate the development of our product portfolio and invest more in our partners’ success,” says Serguei “SB” Beloussov, founder and CEO of Acronis. “Our goal is to develop market-leading technology and help our partners grow their profits, while providing the best protection for their clients.”
A heavy focus on partners
Recognising that the partner network is critical for its rapid growth, Acronis will allocate a significant portion of the funds to offer more enhanced support for its cloud partners.
SEE:Acronis dubs 2021 ‘year of extortion’ with cyberattacks predicted to rise next year
“The better equipped channel partners are, the better we are all protected. [So] our job is to provide them with the best tools to protect all the systems, workloads and applications of companies worldwide,” Protassov explains.
Acronis will provide partners with additional sales and market resources, faster and localised technical support, dedicated partner success managers, and local data centres in 111 locations worldwide.
This effort builds on the company’s recent partner-related initiatives. In February, it launched the #CyberFit Partner Program to support the development of cloud-focused resellers and service providers.
The company then made available a new version of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud in March, enabling partners to deliver comprehensive cyber protection for all workloads for little to no upfront cost. Just a month after that, Acronis introduced a new partner portal to provide easy access to content, tools, and training for partners.
Besides expanding its product portfolio and partner network, Acronis intends to use the new funds to acquire more companies. It is targeting companies that can help it to “broaden and deepen the protection [its solutions] provide; provide better enablement for service providers, cloud distributors and aggregators; and help to automate operations for our partners,” says Protassov
