Rewind CEO Mike Potter is ready to hit fast-forward after private equity firm H.I.G. Growth Partners took majority ownership of his company over the summer.
“I’ve always wanted to have change in my role, and this is another change that I’m super excited about.”
Mike Potter, Rewind
The Ottawa-based data backup company has watched as revenue for its developer products, like Git, Jira, and Atlassian backups, grows “extremely quickly” in the age of AI. But as its popularity grew, Rewind spent nearly a year trying to find a suitor that would help early investors cash out their stakes. Out of the potential acquisitions and other deals he considered, HIG brought “the best way forward for everybody,” Potter told BetaKit in a late-August interview.
“We felt like this was the best balance between executing what our investors were asking for, but also giving us some potential to continue gaining on the upside as the business continues to grow,” Potter said.
Potter and CTO James Ciesielski founded Rewind in 2015 as a data backup app for the Shopify App Store, before extending support to more software platforms, including GitHub, Trello, and QuickBooks.
By late 2021, Rewind had raised more than $100 million CAD from firms like New York-based Insight Partners, Inovia Capital, and seed round leader ScaleUp Ventures. After 11 years in business and 25,000 customers, Potter understood why some of these investors asked him to find a deal: they had “been invested in Rewind for quite a long time.”
“Naturally, funds come to a point where they need to exit the positions that they’ve had, and that was kind of what we were running into with everybody,” Potter said.
In July, Rewind announced the deal with HIG. Potter did not disclose how much the transaction was worth, but said he and Ciesielski remain the largest shareholders of Rewind after HIG, and that Inovia and Insight didn’t sell off their entire stake in the company.
With the backing of a big private equity firm, Potter is excited to ride the AI era tailwinds that have benefited Rewind so far. He explained how Atlassian forcing its customers to migrate their data to its Cloud product, along with the unpredictability of AI, has developers on track to become Rewind’s largest customer segment sometime this year, overtaking e-commerce.
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“We’ve seen [AI] making changes to SaaS data that is unintended, that customers want to roll back from,” Potter said. “Sometimes it’s rolling back the entire thing, sometimes it’s recovering from a complete deletion of data, other times it’s just knowing what was changed and who changed it.”
Potter said that Rewind’s vision is to “back up the entire cloud and restore it in seconds,” and its new backers free the company up to potentially make acquisitions to achieve that goal. Potter said this could include expanding into new data backup areas or expanding the business’s capabilities beyond backup. For example, Potter said customers have asked if Rewind could move into general SaaS resiliency by helping them maintain operations if systems go down, or proactively monitor their systems and alert them if things go wrong.
“There are lots of things that we can do rather than just simply backing up and restoring the data, and those would be some of the features that we’d be looking to add to Rewind over the coming years,” Potter said.
While increased demand had other companies interested in nabbing Rewind for themselves, the HIG investment gave Potter a way to stick around and see through the next stage of his business’s journey.
“When we started, we were mainly bootstrapped; [then] we raised a little bit of capital, we experienced what life was like with VC investors raising a Series A, raising a Series B; now we get to experience what life is like being supported by a PE firm with big ambitions,” Potter said. “From my perspective, I’ve always wanted to have change in my role, and this is another change that I’m super excited about.”
Feature image courtesy Alex Riehl for BetaKit.