Remarkable 2020 year for Komprise

Komprise, leader in data management for unstructured data, briefed The IT Press Tour recently and we learned great things from the team, on the company and product side. 2020 was definitely a great year for data management in general and for Komprise in particular.

The company saw a solid adoption securing many new customers, +380% for volume of data under management, more than 50 new partners. Business metrics are good in all directions. Partnerships with IBM, HPE and Pure Storage are very active worldwide generating a significant confortable revenue stream. The solution is also listed on AWS and Azure marketplaces and was certified with AWS Outposts. We also detect some management turnover in sales both in US and EMEA.

The product continues to be among the top ones in tiering, replication and migration for on-premises and in-the-cloud file and S3 storage with strong analytics thanks to Elastisearch.

Nevertheless, such companies have to deal with the notion of platform as users consider data movers as tools and globally tools companies sooner and later reach a plateau. Komprise management team has to think about the next phase of the company.

Started in 2014, the company has already raised $50M and expects to start a new financial campaign in 2022 to probably reach $100M or even pass that bar. Being frugal is a value when things are good but could be a challenge in tough times, we saw several examples since the Covid pandemic has started.

Komprise has the dream to become an unicorn or do an IPO. Promoting such event and ambition has a value to trigger some talks with potential acquirers. Honestly IPO won't happen as I anticipate an exit by acquisition, this is something I said for a few years as the product will make sense for several gorillas. The founding team has already sold their previous company and they will follow similar path, no doubt for me. We'll see... 

And another news in terms of product adoption, Komprise should announce a phase 2 of a partnership with an established storage vendor. We'll learn more mid February.