Clumio: How Poojan Kumar Raised $11M Off a Deck, Built AWS Backup and Sold to Commvault

TL;DR: Clumio is a cloud backup and recovery company built for data stored on AWS, best known for protecting Amazon S3. It was founded in 2017 by Poojan Kumar, a former Oracle and VMware engineer whose first company, PernixData, was bought by Nutanix in 2016. Kumar raised an $11M Series A on a deck before Clumio had a product, then a $40M Series B that he described on the show as preempted. Press releases put total funding at $261M after a $75M Series D in February 2024. Seven months later, Commvault agreed to buy Clumio's assets, and its SEC filings show a final cash price of about $44.3M. Kumar told the early story on The Product Market Fit Show. The episode aired in May 2024 (Season 3), a few months before the Commvault deal was announced, so the acquisition is not discussed in the interview.

A note on sourcing. Anything labeled "as he shared on the show" comes from the interview and has not been independently confirmed. Funding and deal figures labeled with a source and date were checked against press coverage, company announcements and Commvault's SEC filings in October 2026.

What does Clumio do?

Clumio sells backup and recovery as a cloud service for companies that run on AWS. Instead of installing backup software and hardware, a customer turns on Clumio and its cloud data, such as Amazon S3 buckets, gets backed up and can be restored after an outage, a mistake or a cyberattack.

Kumar picked the category by looking for a market that was big, tied to data, and poorly served once workloads moved to the public cloud. He said backup fit all three, and that old data center architectures could not simply be moved over.

"Backup is a large market, and as people move into the cloud, they’re going to need backup in the cloud also." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

Clumio's February 2024 Series D announcement named Atlassian, LexisNexis and Cava as customers and said it protected more than 100 petabytes of cloud data for hundreds of customers. The same release said its ARR quadrupled in 2023. That growth figure is the company's own claim, and it is the "grew 4x" in the episode title.

Key stat: as of February 2024, Clumio reported 4x year-over-year ARR growth and more than 100 PB of data protected (company press release).

Who founded Clumio?

Clumio was founded in 2017 by Poojan Kumar, who served as CEO, with co-founders Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil, according to 2019 coverage of the company's launch. Both co-founders had held engineering roles at VMware and Nutanix.

Kumar's path, as he told it on the show, was about a decade at Oracle and a couple of years at VMware, after a grad degree at Stanford. He said he almost dropped out of Stanford to start a company and is glad he did not, because the dot-com bubble burst.

His first startup was PernixData, a storage company that used flash inside enterprise servers to speed up storage. Nutanix announced it would acquire PernixData in August 2016, and the price was not disclosed. As Kumar shared on the show, PernixData had raised about $60M across a Series A, B and C before the sale.

He started Clumio about a year later. He said a big part of the reason was personal: his whole career had been in the data center, and he wanted to build a cloud SaaS product.

"It’s as hard every single time, and it’s fun every single time." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

How much has Clumio raised?

All rounds below are from company announcements and press coverage. Clumio reported a running total with each round, which makes the sequence easy to check.

• Series A, October 2017: $11M, led by Sutter Hill Ventures (reported when Clumio came out of stealth in August 2019).
• Series B, November 2018: $40M, led by Index Ventures with Sutter Hill participating. On the show, Pablo described the B as preempted, and Kumar did not dispute it.
• Out of stealth, August 2019, with $51M raised across the A and B. Angel backers named at the time included Veritas founder Mark Leslie and John Thompson, then chairman of Microsoft's board.
• Series C, November 2019: $135M, co-led by Sutter Hill Ventures and Altimeter Capital with Index Ventures, bringing total funding to $186M. Clumio called it the largest Series C ever for an enterprise SaaS company less than two years old.
• Series D, February 2024: $75M, led by Sutter Hill Ventures with Index Ventures, Altimeter Capital and new investor NewView Capital.

Key stat: total funding of $261M as of February 2024, per Clumio's Series D press release. One trade outlet put it at $262M.

No valuation was publicly disclosed for any round, so none is given here.

What happened to Clumio? The Commvault acquisition

Commvault announced on September 24, 2024 that it would acquire Clumio, calling the price not material and paying with cash on hand. The deal closed on October 1, 2024.

Commvault's own filings give the terms. Its fiscal 2025 annual report says it bought "certain assets of Clumio, Inc." for an initial $44.9M in cash. Closing adjustments cut that by about $0.6M, to a final cash price of about $44.3M. Commvault also granted about $13M in restricted and performance stock units to Clumio's co-founders and certain employees, vesting over three years, with the performance units tied to goals. Early press reports put the deal at about $47M.

Key stat: final cash consideration of about $44.3M for Clumio's assets, plus about $13M in stock awards, per Commvault's 10-K for the year ended March 31, 2025.

That price was well below the $261M Clumio had raised. Trade coverage at the time framed it as a sale at a steep discount to funding. Commvault now sells Clumio's technology under its own brand, including Clumio Backtrack.

How did Kumar raise $7M and then $11M on a deck?

Both of Kumar's companies needed money before they could show anything. He said the first alpha or beta took 10 to 20 engineers and a year to a year and a half, so a quick prototype was not an option.

"In Pernix case, we went and raised $7 million Series A with basically a PowerPoint deck with all the three things." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

The three things were the idea, the market and the team. The idea had to be unique. The market had to be big. The team had to make a multimillion-dollar check feel safe.

His idea-finding method starts with what he calls a discontinuity, a shift that legacy players cannot adapt to. Hard disk to flash was one, and it produced Pure Storage and Nutanix. Data center to public cloud was another, and it produced Snowflake and Datadog.

"But bottom line is it starts with a discontinuity, and you go from there." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

Then the deck lays out the shift, the market, why incumbents cannot follow, and early customer validation. Kumar also had a fallback. At PernixData, if $7M did not come together, Plan B was a $1M to $1.5M seed, which he felt sure of given 15 years in enterprise. He did not lead with Plan B.

His targeting was narrow. He said he pitched fewer than 10 firms for the PernixData A, all of them investors who knew enterprise B2B and would write a Series A on an idea and a team.

"You really have to go and get to these folks, and you get one shot." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

He practiced on other firms first, even the second time around. He called it a little-known secret that he still pitched a couple of VCs at Clumio just to sharpen the pitch before going to the ones he wanted.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, fewer than 10 targeted VC pitches produced PernixData's $7M Series A.

How did Clumio find its first customers?

Kumar's method for early customers was plain hustle. At PernixData, he stood next to the booth of an incumbent storage vendor at a conference and listened for the people asking the deepest technical questions. He followed one of them out and introduced himself.

As he shared on the show, that person became PernixData's first paying customer, a $15,000 deal.

He bought it for two servers. That customer later joined the company as its first systems engineer.

At Clumio, he did the same thing with more structure. He went to a big industry conference with 15 to 20 meetings set up through LinkedIn and his network. As he shared on the show, those three or four days of lunches, coffees and dinners produced Clumio's first five alpha customers.

He gave alpha customers the product free. The point was feedback, not revenue: getting the product from a 0.8 version to a 1.0 inside real customer environments.

"That time that they’re giving you and the feedback is what is priceless, and you should focus on that." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

He argued enterprise buyers are not tire kickers. They are asked to install software and give an hour a week, and they will not do that for something they do not need.

Key stat: as he shared on the show, 15 to 20 pre-booked meetings at one conference turned into Clumio's first 5 alpha customers.

Why did Clumio stay at 15 to 20 people after an $11M raise?

During stealth, Kumar said, the whole company was product and engineering, 15 to 20 people at most. Sales came only after the alphas and betas showed signal and some repeatability.

He was blunt about the money.

"Firstly, I think I raised the $10 million, $11 million because I could. Reality is I didn’t need more than five." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

As he shared on the show, the first year and a half to two years, through the alpha and beta product, burned about $3M to $3.5M. The rest was insurance. He said a bigger team would have slowed iteration, not sped it up.

His rule was simple: do not hire just because you can.

His definition of product-market fit is about sales, not usage. Can you hire a new rep, point them at a clear ideal customer profile and two or three use cases, give them six to nine months to ramp, and watch them build pipeline and close deals? If yes, and you can repeat it, you can scale.

He also admitted Clumio's path was not straight. Asked for his one piece of advice, he said the team had to pivot more than once to find the real pain and repeatability.

"It’s like what we thought was true was not really true." — Poojan Kumar, Clumio

Key lessons from Poojan Kumar's playbook

1. Start from a discontinuity. Look for a shift, like disk to flash or data center to cloud, that incumbents cannot follow. Then dig until you find the specific workload where old architectures break. For Clumio, that was backup in the cloud. 2. A deck can raise a real A if it proves three things. A unique idea, a big market and a team that can build it. Add customer conversations that test whether the pain is real. 3. Pitch fewer investors, better. Kumar went after fewer than 10 firms that understood enterprise B2B. He burned a couple of meetings to practice first, because you often get one shot. 4. Raise what you can, spend what you need. He raised $11M and said he needed $5M. The team stayed at 15 to 20 people until customers showed repeatability. 5. Define PMF as a repeatable sales motion. A new rep with a clear ICP and two or three use cases should be able to ramp and close. Until that works, keep iterating.

The ending matters too. Clumio raised $261M and sold its assets for a fraction of that, which shows how far fundraising success and outcome can split. For related reading, see getting your first enterprise customer, product-market fit for B2B enterprise, founder-led sales and PointFive's repeat-founder story.

Listen to the full interview: He raised $11M off a deck. Here's how he launched Clumio and grew 4x to over 8-figures in ARR.

FAQ: Clumio

Q: What is Clumio? A: Clumio is a cloud backup and recovery service for data on AWS, including Amazon S3. It was founded in 2017. Commvault acquired its assets in October 2024 and now sells the technology as part of its own product line.

Q: Who is the CEO of Clumio? A: Poojan Kumar co-founded Clumio in 2017 with Woon Ho Jung and Kaustubh Patil, and was its CEO. He was named as co-founder and CEO in the February 2024 Series D announcement. Since October 2024, Clumio has been part of Commvault.

Q: How much funding did Clumio raise? A: Clumio raised $261M in total as of February 2024. The rounds were an $11M Series A (2017), a $40M Series B (2018), a $135M Series C (2019) and a $75M Series D (2024).

Q: Who were Clumio's investors? A: Sutter Hill Ventures led the Series A and Series D and co-led the Series C. Index Ventures led the Series B. Altimeter Capital co-led the Series C, and NewView Capital joined in the Series D.

Q: Who acquired Clumio, and for how much? A: Commvault bought Clumio's assets. The deal closed on October 1, 2024. Commvault's annual report gives a final cash price of about $44.3M, plus about $13M in stock awards to Clumio's co-founders and certain employees.

Sources: Listen to the Full Founder Story

• Poojan Kumar, Clumio — a repeat founder who sold PernixData to Nutanix, then raised an $11M Series A on a deck to build cloud backup for AWS, and grew Clumio to $261M raised before Commvault bought it in 2024.

Listen to the full episode at pmf.show for the complete story.

Last updated: October 2026