Jaspreet Singh

Founder & CEO Druva

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Jaspreet Singh founded Druva in Pune in 2008 with two former Veritas colleagues, betting on a proposition that sounded reckless at the time: that enterprise backup — the most conservative corner of enterprise IT, a category built on tape libraries, purpose-built appliances and software licensed by the terabyte — could be delivered entirely as a service. Data protection is where organisations are least willing to experiment, because the product’s value is only proven on the worst day of the year. Druva’s argument was that the cloud changed the economics of the worst day: if the backup itself lives in the cloud, recovery is not gated by hardware you have to own, maintain and over-provision, and global deduplication across customers makes the storage cheaper than any single customer could achieve alone. The company took eleven years to reach unicorn status and another two to reach a $2 billion valuation, and has since consolidated a position Singh describes bluntly as scarce — the last major independent backup vendor, in a category where every other significant player has been acquired or taken private. Under him the platform has extended to multi-cloud deployment across AWS and Azure and to agentic AI assistants for investigation and administration.

Career Highlights

• Founded Druva in Pune in 2008 with Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman, all three formerly of Veritas Software, and has led it as chief executive throughout; the company relocated its primary base to Santa Clara, California by 2012.
• Built what Druva describes as the first cloud-native data protection platform, displacing a category previously built on hardware appliances and perpetual software licences.
• Raised $130 million in June 2019, crossing a $1 billion valuation, then $147 million in April 2021 at a $2 billion valuation, following Series A through D rounds between 2010 and 2014.
• Acquired CloudRanger in 2018 for cloud backup and disaster recovery, CloudLanes in 2019, and the Salesforce data backup specialist sfApex in 2020.
• Directed an eighteen-month engineering programme to add Azure alongside AWS, letting customers deploy the Druva service into any region of either cloud.
• Launched the Dru Assist and Dru Investigate AI assistants, with more than 700 customers having tested Dru Investigate by early 2025.
• Filed to take Druva public in the 2021-2022 window and withdrew the filing because of market conditions.
• Named as an inventor on multiple patents in data protection and storage technologies.

Professional Journey

Singh trained as a computer scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, and began his career in enterprise infrastructure software, holding engineering and product roles at Veritas Software and at Ensim Corporation. Veritas is the formative entry on that list: it was the dominant storage-management vendor of its era, and it is where he worked alongside Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman, the two people with whom he would found Druva. Working inside the incumbent gave all three of them an unusually precise view of where the incumbent model was brittle.

They founded Druva in Pune in 2008. The name is taken from the Sanskrit Dhruva, the pole star — a fixed reference point, which is an apt metaphor for a backup company. The first customers were financial institutions, a demanding segment for data protection and a credible proving ground, and the product later broadened into general enterprise data management delivered from the cloud. By 2012 the company’s primary base had moved to Santa Clara, giving it access to US enterprise buyers and Silicon Valley capital while retaining engineering depth in India.

Capital came steadily rather than explosively — a Series A in 2010, Series B in 2011, $25 million Series C in 2013 and $25 million Series D in 2014 — reflecting a category where sales cycles are long and proof takes years. The inflection came in June 2019 with a $130 million round that carried the company past a $1 billion valuation. Around that period Singh also used acquisitions to fill product gaps quickly: CloudRanger in 2018 for cloud-native backup and disaster recovery, CloudLanes in 2019, and sfApex in 2020 to cover Salesforce data, a SaaS backup requirement that enterprise customers had begun to discover the hard way.

In April 2021 Druva raised $147 million at a $2 billion valuation, and the company filed to go public in the window that followed. The filing was withdrawn as public markets turned against unprofitable software issuers. Singh’s framing of that outcome since has been to treat privacy as a position of strength rather than a setback: with Veeam, Rubrik, Cohesity and the rest of the field either public, acquired or private-equity owned, he has argued that Druva’s scarcity value as the last independent makes it the only remaining entry point for an acquirer.

Product direction under him has followed enterprise reality rather than fashion. Customers running workloads across more than one hyperscaler wanted their protection layer to follow, so the company spent eighteen months building an Azure architecture to sit alongside its original AWS footprint, allowing deployment into any region of either — a substantial undertaking for a vendor that, as he has put it, has to run, operate and secure the service end to end rather than shipping software for someone else to run. On AI, Druva shipped two assistants, Dru Assist for administration and Dru Investigate for interrogating protected data during incidents, with Singh candid that user expectations set by general-purpose chatbots have made the boundaries of a domain-specific assistant hard to communicate.

Education

Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science