Sequoia-Backed Eon Worth $1.4 Billion After Less Than a Year

(Bloomberg) -- Cloud backup startup Eon Inc. has closed a new funding round that values the company at $1.4 billion less than a year after its founding — an unusually speedy trajectory to unicorn status.

BOND led the $70 million financing, which is the startup’s fourth so far this year. Existing investors also participated, including Greenoaks Capital Partners, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The deal brings Eon’s total funding to $200 million.

The startup, founded in January by a group of Amazon Web Services alumni, is aiming to make cloud backups faster and more seamless for companies. Eon was in stealth until last month, when it officially launched. Ofir Ehrlich, its chief executive officer, said Eon has seen “crazy customer traction.”

Ehrlich started the company with Gonen Stein, whom he worked with as a co-founder at CloudEndure, which AWS acquired in 2019. Eon’s third co-founder is Ron Kimchi, who was a general manager at AWS. The trio’s experience working in cloud infrastructure is what prompted them to start Eon, Ehrlich said, with the idea that backup services have not adequately kept up with the complexities of the move to the cloud.

Companies are spending “hundreds of billions of dollars annually on the cloud, out of which 20% is backup spend,” Ehrlich said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “And today it does not work. It is very cumbersome.”

Jay Simons, a general partner at BOND, said the firm saw Eon’s potential quickly. “From our first meeting with Eon’s founders, we knew they were onto something that would reshape the enterprise landscape,” Simons said.

Currently Eon has about 10 corporate customers, in industries like retail, education tech and finance, though the startup declined to share any specific names.

The company said it will use the funding to hire engineers, marketing and sales staff. The company currently has almost 50 employees.

--With assistance from Katie Roof and Caroline Hyde.

(Updates with comments from CEO in the fifth paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected the number of funding rounds for the startup.)