Kalaari capital’s new seed and incubation programme KStart invests Rs 3.4 Cr in ParaBlue

2014 founded data protection on cloud startup ParaBlu received Rs 3.4Cr in funding from Kalaari capital’s seed and incubation programme KStart.

“As cloud usage continues to increase within enterprises, there is tremendous opportunity ahead for ParaBlu’s unique product,” says Vani Kola, MD, Kalaari Capital.

ParaBlu was founded by Anand Prahlad and Ananda Rao Ladi, and provides secure cloud based storage facility to enterprises, enabling them to store business assets on cloud. Anand Prahald is the former Managing Director of McAfee India center while Ananda Rao Ladi was senior vice president of software firm Mindtree.

“ParaBlu was founded with the singular vision of being the security vendor of choice for all enterprise data outside the firewall,” said Prahlad, President, ParaBlu.

Kstart was launched on 5^th February 2016 and is a unique seed program that will empower the next generation startups and accelerate disruptive ideas to become market leading companies. Apart from ParaBlue Kstart invested in customer engagement platform Active.ai, finance platform for healthcare services Affodplan, and web video streaming Indee. ParaBlu is the 4th company in its portfolio. Kalaari plans to invest about $20 million (about Rs 135 Cr) as part of KStart in up to 40 startups over the next two years.

To strengthen their initiative of KStart, Kalaari Capital announced key additions to the leadership team. Kstart added Muthiah Venkateswaran as Partner. Kalaari has a portfolio of 88 companies that include CreditVidya, YourStory, UrbanLadder, Snapdeal, Myntra, and more. It has raise around $497M in funds.

RightScale 2016 state of cloud reports show that cloud adoption is increasing. Cloud users are running applications in an average of 1.7 times on cloud. 31 percent increase in enterprises running more than 1,000 VMs, up from 22 percent in 2015. Now the number one challenge is not security but to find resources that can work on it.

Soon every piece of data will be deployed on cloud and data protection on cloud players will be in demand. In such a case ParaBlu’s growth will lead to two options. Either it will be acquired by large internet giants like Google or work towards the next big disruptive idea to compete with it.