How Rewind is turning back time for lost SaaS data

Between human error, cyber attacks, API failures, and other risks, data loss is more a case of ‘when’ than ‘if.’ However, while two-thirds of enterprises use at least 26 different SaaS applications, only 68% of respondents said that 40% or more of their sensitive cloud data was encrypted.

Rewind Cofounder and CEO Mike Potter has personal experience with data loss. In the late 2010s, working at Adobe Systems, he was presenting to a room of a few hundred people. “[I] went to advance my slides and nothing happened,” he recalls. “The computer [was] completely frozen. I apologized to everybody, and I rebooted my computer.” But all that appeared was an image of a hard drive with a question mark over it. The data was gone, and the event left a lasting impression.

“I just made it my mission to make sure that nobody ever experiences the same thing that I went through on that day.”

The ‘kiss of death’ to Potter’s hard drive erased hours of work during a critical presentation. The experience turned Potter into a self-proclaimed “backup nerd,” but more importantly, it inspired him to create a solution.

The hidden risks of cloud convenience

In 2015, Potter was looking into e-platform backups and found that many of Shopify’s customers were asking how to back up their Shopify stores, which were frequently lost or deleted by mistake. He discovered that, although cloud platforms are built to withstand catastrophic failures — “If it gets hit by a meteorite, if there’s a fire in the data center, that sort of stuff that is absolutely handled by the platforms” — they are not designed to recover data lost at the individual account level.

While SaaS tools such as Slack, Atlassian, and Google Workspace offer the infrastructure to manage and store, customers are responsible for user access control, compliance with industry regulations, and protecting user data against accidental deletions, insider threats, or cyberattacks. “If something happens to your account and just your account, your SaaS provider will not help you,” Potter explains. “You cannot call support and ask them to restore the data to the way it was.”

Further, as businesses have swapped physical backup methods for cloud backups, a growing volume of data is left vulnerable to data-loss events. If you don’t have direct access or control of your data, consider it at risk, Potter says.

“Anytime you’re using a SaaS application, you are putting your data into someone else’s system… And if they decide that one day you no longer have access to your data, you no longer have access to your data.”

Beyond SaaS apps, he adds, third-party applications pose a further risk, and they often aren’t properly vetted. “And yet those third-party applications have the same access to data as most of the main applications do.”

From prototype to portfolio

Spotting an opportunity to solve a common query of Shopify merchants, Potter and business partner James Ciesielski launched a prototype of Rewind in 2015: an automated solution for backing up Shopify stores and enabling users to restore their data quickly and in real-time. Within six months, hundreds of merchants had come to rely on Rewind’s backup service, and by 2016, the founders had transitioned to full-time roles at the company, headquartered in Ottawa, Canada.

The following year, off the back of its Shopify success, Rewind was approached by BigCommerce to build a similar solution for its ecommerce platform: automated, continuous backups of BigCommerce merchants’ online stores.

Rewind’s backup-as-a-service offering continued to gain traction, expanding into accounting software through a partnership with QuickBooks in 2018 and serving more than 10,900 customers by 2019. In 2020, Rewind’s three-year growth was 1,113%, powered in part by the heightened demand for cloud-native systems and protections caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020, protecting the data of more than 80,000 business customers worldwide and having increased its revenue by more than 12 times in three years,  Rewind raised a $15M Series A. Potter and Ciesielski didn’t waste any time raising their Series B in 2021, with Insight Partners at the top of their investor wishlist due to its expertise in cybersecurity and portfolio of data protection vendors, including Veeam, Recorded Future, Armis, and Wiz.

“When we looked through the list of [Insight’s] portfolio companies, we saw companies that we wanted to be like, and companies that were in our sector, and potential acquirers of the business. The whole list was an absolute home run for us.”

Insight Partners led Rewind’s $65M Series B in September 2021. “This latest round of funding will allow us to expand our reach, bring additional SaaS backup solutions to the market, and raise awareness for the need to include all cloud and SaaS applications in a business’s backup and recovery strategy,” Potter said of the partnership.

“One of those things you learn the hard way”

Potter believes that to protect your data is to protect your business, and Rewind’s comprehensive backup solution is designed specifically for mission-critical SaaS and cloud data. This, and its emphasis on simplicity, sets it apart from competitors. “This is not forensic science. We can’t go into the hard drive and recover that data. But if you had installed the product before the problem happened, we’d be easily recovering your data right now.”

For instance, customers can’t selectively choose what they want to back up — Rewind backs up everything to avoid any chance of data loss. “The only choice we let customers make when they’re setting up their account is to pick where the data is going to be stored,” explains Potter. “We’re the experts. We know what to do. Let us take care of it. It really doesn’t affect your operation at all.”

The myth that SaaS providers protect user data is pervasive, adds Potter, and Rewind still encounters customers who are “shocked to learn that if something happens in their account from a SaaS perspective, they cannot call that support line and get them to restore the data.” Often, customers come to Rewind after a data loss, says Potter. “It’s one of those things you learn the hard way.”

Backing up the future

Ten years in, Rewind has grown its customer base from 41 to over 25,000 in more than 100 countries. It serves businesses across ecommerce, software development, accounting, and productivity — the likes of Shopify, Mailchimp, GitHub, QuickBooks and most recently, Monday.com — and continues to explore future integrations and new platforms.

Looking to the future of the cybersecurity space and the growing role of AI, Potter is wary of “the talk of agents taking over and replacing humans.”

“We haven’t seen that take effect just yet,” he says. “It is definitely going to happen one day, but I think [there’s] probably a little bit of overhype going on.”

As for the industry more generally, Potter predicts that the current data access model — where your data lives entirely within a SaaS provider’s platform and is accessed through APIs — will evolve dramatically in the next few years.

“Data is going to shift from being only in the SaaS provider’s application back into … a database that you control, own, and is under your purview … locked off from the rest of the world.”

For now, Rewind’s next step will be supporting larger, Fortune 500 customers, says Potter. “We’ve generally focused on selling to small- to medium-sized businesses. The focus for Rewind is now moving up market and protecting data for some of the world’s largest companies.”

The vision remains clear: to back up the cloud and recover it in seconds. “We want to back up every mission-critical SaaS application that exists.”

Scale up your career: See all open roles at Rewind.

*Note: Insight has invested in Rewind.