In this interview, host John speaks with HYCU (formerly Haiku) CEO Simon Taylor and Bain Capital Ventures partner Enrique Salem about the company’s recent $87.5 million Series A round. Simon explains how HYCU’s multi‑cloud backup‑as‑a‑service offers native integrations across public clouds and on‑prem environments, simplifying data protection and helping defend against the surge in ransomware attacks. Enrique emphasizes that the true business value lies in rapid data recovery, not just backup, and describes why protecting data is critical for all enterprise operations. The conversation also touches on market interest from SPACs, why HYCU chose a traditional VC round, and the broader cloud landscape: the continued dominance of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, the persistence of on‑prem data centers, and a hybrid shift where roughly 40 % of customers moved workloads back on‑prem after COVID. Enrique outlines Bain Capital’s investment thesis, noting the massive, evolving market for data protection across both cloud and on‑prem, and anticipates continued, though cooling, SPAC activity. The interview rounds out with insights into competitive dynamics among cloud providers and how HYCU positions itself to serve a global customer base of over 2,000 organizations in 70 + countries.
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Welcome back. Bain Capital Ventures leading an $87.5 million Series A funding round for enterprise software company Haiku, which provides multi-cloud data backup and disaster recovery services. For more on the round and the outlook for the sector, we are joined by Haiku CEO Simon Taylor and Bain Capital Ventures partner Enrique Salem. Simon, good to meet you. Enrique, good to see you again. Simon, when I see Haiku and how it's framed, I think about ransomware. And I think about more and more what I'm hearing about enterprises hedging their bets across multiple clouds. How does this play work uniquely in this environment?
You know, it's a great question. Thank you very much for having us on. We're thrilled about this round. You know, to your question, over the last sort of year and a half, especially during COVID there was a massive rise in ransomware attacks across the world. And I think one of the challenges is, you know, backup and recovery has always been kind of a second-class citizen in the world of IT. So you had a lot of companies that were using very legacy, very old data protection software that was very complicated, hard to use, hard to implement. What Haiku has built is a real multi-cloud backup as a service that natively integrates with every single cloud, both on-prem and in the public cloud as well. And I think those native integrations and the simplicity make it easier for customers to operate. And really stops the bad guys from getting in the back door. And that's really one of the name of the game these days with all of the criminality and that major rise in ransomware attacks.
Enrique, you've been in the enterprise game and security game for a long time. When I look at this multi-cloud environment, I'm trying to figure out where the value is gonna be. What are the applications? What are the services that are gonna demand profit and growing profit over time, not just top-line revenue. How does Haiku address that question of where that value and growth in value is gonna be over time?
I think what you wanna think about, John, is that everything is data now. And if you look at, you know, your meeting invite, your phone entry, a video, it's all data. And so what we're trying to do here, as Simon was just saying, is we need to protect that data. And, you know, I've been in the backup industry for a long time, and we talk a lot about it being backup. What really matters is recovery because you can't run your business if your data is not available. And so the value really comes from making sure that when you're trying to get something done, you have access to what you need— your email, your calendar info, but anything that you use to run your business. And so that's where the real value comes from.
Simon and Enrique, good morning. It's Deirdre. Simon, a question for you. I think you were quoted somewhere else saying that you received a lot of interest, not just from from the traditional VC and PE people, but also from SPACs. Can you talk a little bit? Were you surprised by this? Why did you decide, you know, to raise a round instead of, you know, take advantage of this pretty hot market that we've seen over the last few months?
You know, Deirdre, I'd be surprised if my mother doesn't create a SPAC one of these days soon. Everybody I know has a SPAC. So from my perspective, I think, look, you You know, I waited to raise its first round. We wanted to make sure we were successful in the market. We've now got over 2,000 customers in 70+ countries. We wanted to partner with a Tier 1 firm that understood data protection, not just today, not just in the past, but had a clear vision for where it was going. And we certainly found that with Enrique Salem and Bain Capital Ventures and couldn't be more thrilled to be partnering with them.
Enrique, has your mom started a SPAC yet? And broadly, what do you think of what's been happening in this space? I did— I said that the market has been red hot, but certainly in terms of SPACs, it has been cooling somewhat over the last few weeks. What's your take?
Yeah, you know, it's interesting is my mom will be giving me feedback on this. She'll say, why didn't we invest $100 million, is what she'll be telling me after this program. But look, I think the— I think the market is continuing to to evolve. I think there's a lot of capital available and a lot of great companies that can take advantage of that capital. You know, Haiku is special because it is in a massive market. That is what we're so excited about at Bain Capital, is that specifically we can partner with Simon early in this company's journey. And every business in the world needs what Haiku is doing— protect their data from both a security and a data protection perspective. As far as SPACs, I think there's going to be a lot of companies that previously couldn't have been available to public market investors. And so I think that momentum will continue. Will it be as hot over the next 12 months as it has been for the past 12? I don't think so, but it will continue for sure.
And finally, Simon, over the past year, what have you seen happen in the mega-scale cloud environment? You know, not just AWS, but also Azure, Google Cloud, maybe some others you'd throw in there. Are the, you know, kind of second-tier mega-scale providers able to gain ground in a significant way or, or not? Are they capturing enough business even through your customer base to sort of change the calculus on what's happening competitively for them?
Yeah, look, I would say this. I think there's the big three, right? So you mentioned them— AWS, you know, Google and Azure. And I think they're going to remain the big three for the foreseeable future. I don't see, you know, an incumbent, somebody else coming in and really challenging them or taking them out. But what I would say is that there is an enormous number of niche kind of edge cases that we're seeing with customers saying, look, I'm going to maybe try Nutanix for this. I'm going to try some aspects of VMware for something else. You know, technology will continue to evolve. But, you know, another interesting paradigm shift that we've seen during COVID everybody fled to the cloud. I mean, literally all of our customers said we're moving to the cloud right now. But about 40% of our customers then moved some of their workloads back on-prem as well. So, so I believe that the, the actual data center itself is going to remain very important, maybe more important than is really regularly reported on. But we'll certainly see a continued explosion in the public cloud going forward.
Enrique Salem, back to the, I guess, on-prem data center effect. Is that affecting how you are investing at all?
You know, we are very focused on where folks are headed. And I think we're in this 20 to 30 year transition where the half trillion dollars that is still being spent today in the on-premise data center will continue to move towards cloud infrastructure. And that's why we love HYCU, because we can do both. We can invest in protecting data on-prem and protecting data across all the cloud providers.
