Coming out of stealth today is Eon, a startup whose founders sold their previous venture to Amazon and are now on a mission to make some sense of the very complicated world of backing up cloud infrastructure for organisations within AWS. The company has emerged with a product, an established customer base, three successful funding rounds amounting to $127 million, and a post-money valuation of $750 million.
Eon, founded in both Israel and New York back in January 2024, has raised quite a bit. Vine Ventures, Meron Capital, and Eight Roads are a few of the investors who contributed to the $20 million seed round that Sequoia led. It then raised money in a $30 million Series A round that included Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sheva.
Eon last completed a $77 million Series B round, one of whose investors was Quiet Ventures.
Infrastructure backup has traditionally been a part of enterprise IT, going back to a time when companies mostly used an on-premises server architecture, software was issued on floppy discs, and clouds were what one looked out of the office window at. 
That’s why older backup solutions are not suitable for today’s cloud environment architecture because these requirements have grown increasingly complex, says Ofir Ehrlich, CEO of Eon. Smaller customers will have hundreds of terabytes with a single cloud provider, and hundreds of petabytes when considering the whole network. The overall asset inventory is complex: not only active applications but also data that may not be queried on a day-to-day basis (“cold storage”) yet they still need to be retrievable, as well as network appliances, edge devices, and other components.
Billions are being allocated by customers for infrastructure, and the number is expected to reach $838 billion by 2034. Besides this, a remarkable rise in the budgets of backup initiatives, which is not only due to the size of the infrastructure, but the incidents of cybersecurity are also on a continuous rise. Ehrlich reports that it is affected both by internal compliance, that is, the view of the organisation of what is necessary to retain, and by external compliance. Estimates suggest that 10–30% of infrastructure budgets are spent on backup. Saying that it all needs attention is a great deal easier on paper than in reality, and perhaps it has more easily been acknowledged rather than practiced so far.
Ehrlich, together with Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi, had previously founded a recovery service startup called CloudEndure. In 2019, Amazon acquired the company for about $250 million to shore up its AWS offerings. Ehrlich was sure they had solved all the problems back then, and their focus on infrastructure backup at Eon came from lessons learnt through their humbling takedowns in real life:.
Ehrlich said that while at AWS, he learnt of a major ransomware attack involving one of the company’s largest customers. Ehrlich said he couldn’t name the company, and neither could he disclose current customer names of Eon.
“‘Great,’ I said to myself. “This ransomware attack is going to be a fantastic AWS success story!” No, he didn’t mean to imply he was glad about the attack; rather, he said in an interview, “I knew they were fully protected as much as anyone could be.”
They contacted them to verify all was well. Of course it wasn’t.
AWS’s disaster recovery service accommodated what he described as “the top level” of data.
He had assumed that, with all the different backup vendors available on the market, the customer would have covered all the other bases. “It seems like they had a grand fork.” The backup services underwent numerous modifications over time as they went online and following the ransomware incident, including the removal of some applications, the addition of others, and the shifting of data locations. Eon has been very nebulous with information regarding the current problem-solving approaches of the business. But this CEO speaks to a blend of technical experience and product experience that would seemingly support a complete understanding of data storage and access in the cloud.
He discusses one significant development that he refers to as a “novel approach to storage and secondary storage,” which enables Eon to effectively observe and comprehend the larger landscape of infrastructure without constantly rewriting data. He said a number of patents have been filed on the method. “In an industry where file restoration can take weeks, Eon’s innovative backup solution identifies data instantly, saving time, money, and compliance challenges for customers,” said Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital. Ofir, Gonen, and Ron are part of a top-notch team of cloud pioneers ready to shake up how cloud backup management is done.
