Network automation provider BackBox will scale SaaS offerings with newly raised $32M

BackBox, a network automation, security, and management service provider, today announced that it raised $32 million in a series A round led by venture firm Elsewhere Partners. The company says that it’ll put the capital toward increasing its market reach across Europe, the U.S., and Asia via strategic channel programs, as well as building out its team and scaling its offerings in software-as-a-service cloud automation.

With the rise of an increasingly distributed workforce and hybrid, multicloud infrastructures, it’s becoming challenging for businesses to ensure network performance and security. A recent survey by CISO Magazine found 76.36% of security professionals believe their cloud service providers are responsible for securing their cloud instances. But according to a Fortinet survey, enterprises adopting multicloud solutions — i.e., solutions spread across multiple public clouds — are concerned by weak data protection controls followed by a lack of security skills and understanding how solutions fit together.

Dallas, Texas-based BackBox, which was founded in 2009 by Rafi Zvi, Roy Horev, and Arik Elias, provides the ability to configure tasks associated with backing up, storing, and restoring settings for devices installed on a network. The platform offers a centralized management system for all devices, with a visualization showing a map view of available features. Customers can perform inventory management with reports for connected equipment and automate tasks by building custom workflows.

“Like many software innovators, our primary competition comes from inside the IT department,” CEO Andrew Kahl told VentureBeat via email. “Many organizations custom-build solutions to try to get the comprehensive network and device coverage that BackBox offers. Unlike other vendors or homegrown solutions, BackBox is user-friendly and incredibly simple to deploy, requiring no scripting and dramatically reducing the time and brainpower needed to implement and support ongoing network and device management processes.”

Network task automation

Beyond basic automation and backup workloads, BackBox can monitor devices and apps for capacity planning and security, as well as track devices on the network by their identifiers and IPs. The platform can also execute multi-device configuration changes and upgrades, orchestrating things like user and password management and policy implementation.

“Most customer call out how we deliver tremendous time savings by effectively automating daily administration tasks,” Kahl said. “One example being helping our customers discover and connect a device, run a comprehensive health check, populate its inventory, pull a configuration, edit the configuration, validate the change will not cause issues, and push the change back to the source device in just a few minutes – something that would typically take hours if not days. We provide out-of-the-box network automation, where no coding or scripting is required, as well as proactive network health checks and analysis that ensure optimal performance.”

BackBox claims to have over 500 paying enterprise customers, including teams at Airbus, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Deloitte, and Comcast. The company has roughly 30 employees, currently, and expects to more than double its headcount to over 60 by the end of 2022.

“Managing everything from hybrid to multicloud environments and a more distributed — and device-reliant workforce — than ever before, IT teams are looking to simplify and centralize network and device management,” Kahl continued. “Our intelligent automation solutions provide … solutions that help companies streamline complex tasks, ensure network performance and security, and do more with fewer resources.”

On the heels of the latest fundraise, newly appointed CEO Kahl, previously an operating advisor at Elsewhere Partners, will be charged with building out BackBox’s new headquarters. The company plans to keep its engineering teams in Tel Aviv, Israel — its founding city — and focus on growing operations, customer success, and sales departments in the U.S. Cofounder and former CEO Elias will remain with the company and support continued sales efforts, while cofounder and CTO Zvi will head up R&D projects in the Tel Aviv office.

“We expect the growth capital to help us quickly scale the company,” Kahl added. “We’ll focus on expanding our global go-to-market efforts … and [recruiting our] executive team. We expect to make significant senior hires to help lead the new Texas-based operations, as well as growing our sales, channel, product development, and engineering teams. With an expanded team and deeper pockets, we’ll also be able to focus on quickly bringing more product enhancements and new solutions to our customers. Specifically, BackBox will continue to enhance its network vulnerability detection and remediation functionality and plans to expand its cloud automation and SaaS capabilities over time.”