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From Founding to Funding: Perspectives from Murali Balcha, Founder and CTO of Trilio | Trilio

From Founding to Funding: Perspectives from Murali Balcha, Founder and CTO of Trilio
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As the founder of Trilio, our company’s recent Series A funding announcement was one that brought great joy and was the culmination of years of hard work and determination.

The idea for the company came to me after working in enterprise software for over twenty years. My background is in storage, virtualization, and cloud computing, so I’ve seen inflection points in client/server computing, storage area networks, server virtualization, and cloud computing. Every sea change makes existing technologies obsolete but also opens the door for new technologies to enter.

While leading a company-wide cloud initiative at EMC, I saw the challenges of providing data protection for mission-critical applications running in the cloud. The cloud is an infinitely scalable shared resource with hundreds accessing it through their own portals. But nothing was designed to provide data protection in the cloud.  I was inspired to build a product that fits that model.

I wanted to build a great company and next-generation data protection product for enterprises that would be essential tools for their data management. The cloud is not one entity but is often a collection of clouds acting in unison presenting a single cloud view. My vision was to build a comprehensive data management solution for cloud architectures.

Over the past four years, Trilio has built enterprise data protection software for new data center architectures. We had a few hiccups along the way, of course, and even had to pivot our focus. But there were quite a few victories too. A big moment for us came when the largest telecom company in the US chose Trilio over every other firm in a three-day vendor bake-off. Later, we had another great moment when we met representatives from a major international automaker at the OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. Now we are their OpenStack backup solution.

Our solution provides all the bells and whistles of an established backup product. Data protection is only one aspect of a bigger data management issue that users face in multiple cloud/multiplatform environments. Business value is locked in these applications and clouds are only the means to execute them. Trilio enables true hybrid clouds for enterprises and yet meets the data compliance and security needs of businesses.

I’m proud of the amazing work we’ve done at Trilio. We developed an enterprise backup solution and implemented by several global Fortune 100 companies. We just announced a $5 million Series A funding round led by .406 Ventures. We see a place for our product in the global market, and this round of funding will help us reach more companies and better serve the clients that we have. Day in and day out, we are seeing an increased need for business assurance across all cloud types and business types. Trilio is uniquely positioned to meet their requirements and help them more effectively and efficiently manage their data.