members-only post Dec 23, 2025 22 min read

Deep Dives

Rubrik Deep Dive: A mission-critical cybersecurity company

A crucial player in a world where data breaches and rogue AI agents are not an IF but a WHEN. In this deep dive you'll learn everything about this unique cybersecurity business, which is operating at the intersection of data and AI.

This is a deep dive a wrote back in September before I had this website, but it is still very relevant today. When Rubrik first popped up on my radar, I was interested right away. What stood out to me is that they are:

• Founder led
• Mission critical
• Growing revenue over 50% year over year
• Named a data protection leader by Gartner six times

As I dug deeper into the business, their founding story, product portfolio, addressable market, and as I followed their quarterly earnings closely, I became increasingly excited.

In this deep dive I will cover the most important parts of the business and share a nuanced, balanced investment thesis. I originally created this deep dive on 26 October and posted it on X, but this is way better in terms of readability.

Without further ado, let's dive in!

1 - Introduction

In a world where data has become both the most valuable asset and the biggest target for modern businesses, protecting it is no longer optional.

Every decision, transaction, and customer interaction runs on data. Whether it’s an AI agent, customer support rep, or a company’s leadership team. Modern businesses are built on data, and when that data is compromised, so is the business. Rubrik sits right at the center of this new reality.

Early on, Rubrik helped companies backup and restore ¹data. But as attacks grew more frequent and severe, a simple backup wasn’t enough. Rubrik shifted to Zero Trust Data Security, which you can think of as airport security for your data: everyone gets checked, every time.

Today, Rubrik focuses on actively protecting data, detecting threats early, and recovering fast when incidents happen. It’s not just about saving data; it’s about keeping businesses running safely in a world where attacks are expected.

In short, Rubrik’s story is the evolution from “backup” to data resilience, a shift that meaningfully expands its value and role inside modern enterprises.

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¹ Back ups and data restores are are essentially a safety net in case anything goes wrong. It's like copying photos to an external drive.

2 - Founding story & timeline

Founded in 2014 by Bipul Sinha (CEO), Arvind Nithrakashyap (CTO), Arvind Jain, and John Kreft, Rubrik set out to build more than backups. Their thesis:

"If cyber risk is a board-level threat, backup and recovery must evolve into a cyber resilience ² platform that identifies threats early, limits blast radius and recovers fast".

Rubriks' mission flows from this thesis:

Key facts & figures:
• HQ: Palo Alto with 3,000+ employees across 22 offices (~46% outside the U.S.)
• Customers: over 6,100; 2,381 with $100K+ annual recurring revenue
• Scale: $1.1B revenue run rate in Q2 2025
• IPO: April 2024 at $32, raising $752M (valuation $5.6B vs $15B today)

Timeline:
• 2015: First converged data management appliance for on-premise ³ environments • 2018: Acquires Datos.io to improve cloud data management
• 2020: Buys Igneous assets to strengthen large-scale unstructured data protection • 2023: Acquires Laminar Security to enhance detection and prevention
• 2024: IPO on NYSE, ticker: RBRK
• 2024–2025: Scales past 6,000 customers and >$1.2B revenue run-rate

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²Cyber resilience refers to keeping data safe, available, and recoverable.

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³On-premise means that a company keeps its software and data on its own servers, physically located inside the company’s buildings, not in the cloud.

3 - What makes Rubrik interesting

In a world where cyberattacks are a “when,” not an “if,” keeping data safe, available, and recoverable has become mission-critical.

IBM estimates the global average cost of a breach at $4.45M in 2024, up 15% in three years. Over 83% of organizations experienced more than one breach. In today’s world it is resilience, not prevention alone, that matters.

A close-to-home example: a 2025 breach at a Dutch cancer screening lab exposed sensitive personal and medical data for ~485,000 women, including some of my family members. Incidents like this highlight why organizations need zero trust architectures, tested recovery points, and rapid ransomware remediation that go beyond traditional backups.

This is exactly Rubrik's core competence: helping organization become resilient against data breaches and ensure they keep operations running, while limiting financial and reputational damage. But they are not the only player out there, so let’s take a closer look at the cybersecurity ecosystem as a whole.

4 - Industry positioning

In the overview below, Rubrik is positioned in the data security category. In their investor presentation, Rubrik highlights most cybersecurity vendors focus on prevention, while they focus on resilience: the ability to protect, withstand, and rapidly recover data and systems from any threat.

I believe this is a very important differentiator. As I mentioned earlier: cyberattacks are no longer if but when. Resilience reframes budget from “nice-to-have” to “must-have,” which supports durable demand and multi-year contracts. There are some core competitors that are going after the same market though.

5 - Core competitors

I find the Gartner Magic Quadrant a great way to quickly map the competitive landscape. Gartner has named Rubrik a leader in the backup and data protection platform category for six consecutive years, which is a big achievement.

As the quadrant shows, Rubrik is mainly competing with three other players:

Commvault (CVLT): powerful but complex:
• Enterprise grade with deep support for both legacy ⁴ and modern workloads
• Very feature rich, but often seen as complex and in need of more tuning and maintenance
• Rubrik wins on ease of use, a modern interface and strong Zero Trust posture
Cohesity: the closest modern rival:
• Similar modern architecture with a cloud focused, scale out approach and a clean interface
• Strong in unstructured data and in consolidating different data services
• Rubrik’s edge is cyber resilience, with deeper integrations around threat detection, identity protection and incident recovery
Veeam: the VMware ⁵ specialist:
• Excellent for VMware and virtualisation heavy environments
• Fast, simple and widely adopted
• Rubrik’s edge is vision. Gartner ranks it higher on completeness of vision because it is pushing further into data security and AI, not just backup

In short, Rubrik operates in a very competitive space where each vendor has clear strengths and weaknesses. But instead of just looking at analyst views, it is also important to see what customers are saying, so let us look at that next.

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⁴ Legacy refers to older systems, software or hardware that are still in use even though newer technology exists.

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⁵ VMware is like turning one physical computer into many virtual ones, each with its own system. You can compare it to separate apartments inside one building.

6 - What customers say

High customer satisfaction is at the core of every successful business. That’s why I always check what customers have to say about a business. My main sources for SaaS reviews are G2, Gartner and Reddit.

Review score:
• G2: 4.4/5 star rating (97 ratings)
• Gartner: 4.4/5 star rating (13 ratings)

Customer feedback consistently highlights three themes:

Ease of use
Reliable ransomware protection
Strong cloud experience

Some users cite pricing and flexibility concerns compared to Veeam or Cohesity, but overall satisfaction is high.

This is underscored by a >80 Net Promotor Score (NPS), which places them in the top 1% of enterprise software companies.

Customer quotes

(…) "Most notable are Rubrik's speed and ease of use. With just a few clicks, you can easily set up backups, monitor jobs, and perform restores thanks to the clear and simple user interface. I have total confidence in our data security because of the immutability and ransomware protection features, as well as the quick and dependable backup performance.” ~ August 2025 (G2)

“The Rubrik DPSM product has been great at identifying sensitive and over-shared data in our organization. There have been some hiccups to work through, but Rubrik has stayed on top of it and helped resolve all issues.” ~ February 2025 (Gartner)

“We’ve been using Rubrik for almost 7 years. Overall, it’s a solid product for both on‑premises and cloud backups (…) Rubrik excels in simplicity, scalability, and ransomware protection. However, with the latest firmware you cannot manage SLAs on Rubrik offline.” ~ January 2025 (Reddit)

This clearly shows the strength of Rubrik's product and differentiation. High satisfaction plus mission-critical value supports >120% net retention ⁶ and a durable land-and-expand motion.

But how large is the actual market they can serve? This is especially interesting given their crowded competitive space.

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⁶ Net retention means that even without adding any new customers, the company grew its revenue from existing customers by 20%.