This investor turned founder scoffs at funding slowdown: 'real businesses' can still get money

YouTube/Nutanix

There's been a lot of talk about a VC investment cool down lately but Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha doesn't buy it.

He thinks "real businesses" are still finding it fairly easy to raise a lot of money.

"Companies with a real business and a real path to become a large company will always get capital," Sinha told Business Insider.

Sinha, who's also an investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners, speaks from his own experience: Rubrik just announced a $61 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures, after raising $51 million in 2015 alone.

"Capital raise at this stage demonstrates the business growth. Investors don’t sign these checks unless they see business traction and there’s a path to become a several billion dollar market cap public company," he says.

Sinha didn't share any actual revenue figures, but shared some signs of rapid growth at Rubrik, a data management startup that helps other companies easily back up and archive their data.

Sinha says Rubrik's been doubling its revenue every quarter, while its quarterly bookings are in the 8-figures, which means the actual revenue and the new contract value added each quarter are at least worth $10 million. His company went from zero to 160 employees since its founding in early 2014, and is planning to double its workforce over the next 12 months.

That growth is showing up most clearly in the enterprise market, Sinha says. Rubrik's closing $250,000 deals in just 76 days on average, a relatively big and fast sales cycle. On top of that, 40% of those customers come back within 6 months to buy more services from Rubrik, he says. Roughly 10% of Rubrik's customers are Fortune 500 companies.

"We are selling into the enterprise, which is very rare for a company at our chronological age," Sinha says.

Perhaps Rubrik's success in the big enterprise space has to do with Sinha's investment background in the business technology space. Sinha has been an investor since 2008, including the past six years at Lightspeed Venture Partners. In fact, he was the first investor in Nutanix, a $2 billion server technology company that filed to go public last year, and Hootsuite, a software company reportedly last valued at $1 billion.

Sinha says he doesn't miss his time as a VC, although he's technically still part of Lightspeed Ventures. He's reduced his role there and doesn't make any new investments now, as he's fully committed to growing Rubrik, he says.

"It's all about the impact of creating something bigger than ourselves. That’s been our ambition from day 1 and that’s what we’re chasing," he says.

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