Datto

Founding and early growth

Datto was founded in 2007 in Norwalk, Connecticut, by software programmer Austin McChord, who initially built and marketed his own hand-made data backup devices. After securing his first customers in 2008, McChord built a system that allowed for data synchronization between two computers, followed by a version of Zenith InfoTech that ran on Linux. The company reached $70,000 in monthly sales by the end of 2009. When a 2010 product release caused older systems to crash, Datto designed a replacement from scratch and released it months later as SIRIS, offered to customers as a free upgrade. Revenue grew quickly thereafter, rising from $9 million in 2011 to $25 million the following year.

Expansion and venture funding

Datto began expanding internationally in July 2013 with the acquisition of its UK distributor, Paradeon Technologies. That September, the company raised $25 million in its first round of venture capital financing, led by General Catalyst Partners, while continuing to sell its products primarily through managed service providers. By this point Datto was focused on small and mid-size businesses, counting Susan G. Komen for the Cure and several NFL teams among its clients. The company broadened its backup offerings in 2014 by purchasing Backupify, a cloud-to-cloud backup company whose focus on backing up server data complemented Datto's emphasis on local and private clouds.

A $75 million Series B round, led mostly by Technology Crossover Ventures, followed in November 2015 and helped make Datto Connecticut's first "unicorn" company. Around the same time the company opened a Sydney office to enter the Australian and New Zealand markets, and its workforce had grown to 550 employees. Datto continued to develop its disaster-recovery products, releasing SIRIS 3 x 1—described as the first all-flash BCDR product with ransomware detection—in June 2016 and the SIRIS 3 data protection platform that October.

European expansion accelerated in mid-2016, when Datto opened its EMEA headquarters in Reading, established data centers in Iceland and Germany, and signed distribution deals in Spain and Greece; a further office opened in Amsterdam in September 2017 to serve the Benelux regions. The company also acquired the networking firm Open Mesh in January 2017. Its headcount continued to climb, reaching 700 employees by January 2017 and 883 by that October, 434 of them in Norwalk.