Odaseva raises $54M to secure Salesforce users
Securing cloud services remains a challenge for enterprises. That's why several companies have been working on security solutions that specifically address that need.
In the latest example of that, Odaseva has raised $54 million in funding. This startup focuses on one sole use case: securing Salesforce environments. Silver Lake Waterman is leading this round, with previous backers F-Prime, Eight Roads and Serena Capital also participating. New backers Eurazeo and Crescent Cove are completing the round.
Odaseva has now raised $90 million to date. It’s not disclosing its valuation but founder and CEO Sovan Bin said the sub-$100 million pre-money estimate in PitchBook is definitely wrong. Considering that this Series C is coming on the back of strong momentum for the company — which passed 100 million users in November 2022 and counts the likes of hotel giant Accor, Schneider Electric and Michelin as customers — the valuation is likely to be much higher.
Odaseva has an interesting backstory that led to the startup’s creation.
Sovan Bin used to work at Salesforce more than a dozen years ago, at a time when the CRM giant was already big but not nearly as big as it is today. He was based in Paris and was tasked with helping some of Salesforce's biggest customers, such as Schneider Electric (which at the time was actually Salesforce's biggest customer globally), figure out how to use Salesforce and have it be as secure as what it was replacing, which was a collection of on-premises solutions.
Bin said that they found that Schneider and the others were all using a collection of different solutions to secure their environments — point solutions, but more around points of vulnerability than points of specific application usage.
“What they wanted was to address all of the security requirements for the single platform, not having to shop around from cyber to data protection to failover management,” he said. “But in the cloud, especially, it seems most vendors are not specialized to focus on large enterprises this way.”
His approach, based on his deep understanding of Salesforce specifically, was to build a solution that can work with it and its particularities and use cases.
It worked, and he saw that there could be a bigger business in selling that solution for others. Thus, Odaseva was born, originally in Paris, later relocating to San Francisco to be closer to customers in the U.S. Its products today include data protection (including backup and restore services); zero-trust data security; data archiving; data compliance (which has definitely grown with regulations); and data platform services (which includes sandbox seeding, automation and more).
Bin is French-Cambodian and the company name Odaseva combines words from both languages, with a very lateral progression to the company’s mission statement. “Oda is based on the word for ‘audacity’ in French, and ‘seva’ comes from a very old word in Cambodia, from Sanskrit, meaning, helping the community in a very selfless way, trying to help the elders. Long story short, it’s referring to trying to be innovative when thinking about customer success.”
As Salesforce has grown in revenue and scope as a business over the last 12 years — it made more than $9 billion in revenue in the last quarter, and since 2012, its full-year revenues have increased more than 13-fold as it's brought on a number of different services for users — so has Odaseva. But so have others after identifying the opportunity here.
The multitude of companies providing security solutions specifically for Salesforce users, and the Salesforce environment, include AppOmni, WithSecure, Opswat, Varonis and even Salesforce itself. That competitive landscape, however, does not seem to faze the startup. Bin tells me that the addressable market is large enough that, even if one day Odaseva might look at tackling other SaaS applications, for now there are no plans to do so.
One other thing to note here: Odaseva’s funding is significant also because of some of the larger market context. The pendulum in enterprise IT over the last several years has swung in the direction of platforms and away from point solutions. The narrative has gone something like this: budgets are constrained so buyers are looking for all-in-one solutions that are much easier (and thus less expensive) to procure and eventually operate, and so there is a consolidation underway as more point solutions (serving narrower use cases) come together under bigger umbrellas.
Odaseva’s focus, and success in pursuing it, implies that there is still very much an opportunity left for players who do not subscribe to that narrative.
“The Odaseva team has built a leading data resiliency platform for the Salesforce ecosystem that provides security and continuity solutions for mission critical applications,” said Shawn O’Neill, managing director and group head of Silver Lake Waterman, in a statement. “Sovan and the Odaseva leadership team have a solid track record of building value and trust with global enterprise customers and we are excited to partner with the team and help drive further growth.”
