Ukrainian venture firm AVentures Capital has invested $500,000 in a U.S. information technology startup that works with Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Called Spinbackup, the IT company, which has its research and development center in Ukraine, developed the cloud-to-cloud backup and cybersecurity technology used in Google’s G Suite tools (Sheets, Docs, Gmail) and Office 356 by Microsoft (Microsoft Office).
According to Spinbackup, while companies and individuals worldwide spend over $74 billion annually on cybersecurity, most of the current data loss on the internet happens due to human factors.
So, taking this into account, the company offers online behavior auditing and security measures to protect data from leakages, along with automatic database backup and recovery services.
The startup aims to “bridge the Blockchain ecosystem and currently leading cloud services by adopting blockchain innovations to protect organizations and individuals against data leaks,” Spinbackup CEO Dmitry Dontsov said on Aug 7.
Subscription is the main source of income for Spinbackup. As of today, more than 1,000 organizations, and in total around 170,000 people, use Office 356 and G Suite together with Spinbackup. According to the company, its customer base increases by 15 percent per month. G Suite’s cheapest subscription offer is $5 per user, per month.
Most of Spinbackup’s customers are small and medium-sized companies, as well as educational institutions such as the University of Tokyo, Gurnick Academy of Medical Arts, and Sensys Gatso.
Currently, the company stores around 200 terabytes of data.
Apart from Google and Microsoft, the Ukrainian IT company also works with Amazon Web Services, and is now developing software for other popular cloud tools.
Seeking to create new products for other customers and expand into new markets, the startup, which has 25 people on staff, started looking for investment, and Ukrainian AVentures stepped up with $500,000.
“Spinbackup has expertise and experience,” Andrey Kolodyuk, a founder and managing partner at AVentures, told the Kyiv Post. “The startup has a global network and thousands of clients. We hope that with this investment, the team will have even better prospects on the global market.”
The investor is not revealing the size of the share in the company it owns after its investment, but according to Andrey Kolodyuk, AVentures usually takes 10-25 percent of a company’s shares when investing in first rounds, and this is the first time Spinbackup has attracted investments.
Kolodyuk, however, says he sees no problems with being a lead investor: “The venture business is always a risk, but that’s why investors are needed – to help companies at a certain stage.”
“We invested in (pet monitoring device developer) Petcube when nobody really believed in it. But now the entire world sees this company’s success, including investors who put money in after us,” the investor said.
The Kyiv Post’s IT coverage is sponsored by Ciklum. The content is independent of the donors.
