Rubrik paid up to $250M for Laminar to become a one-stop data security shop

Rubrik sells cloud data management — backup, recovery and, increasingly, data security — to more than 4,500 enterprise customers.

Undisclosed officially; one source put it 'north of $100 million' and two others closer to $200–250 million. Laminar had raised $67 million.

Rubrik's tools began as backup and management roughly a decade earlier, but chief business officer Mike Tornincasa says the watershed came in 2018, when a customer suffered a ransomware attack that took more than data recovery to fix. The business was 'completely reoriented over the last five years' toward proactive security posture.

Rubrik ran an 'exhaustive search', meeting more than a dozen startups in public-cloud security posture management before choosing Laminar, which launched in 2021 out of stealth with $37 million — later extended to $67 million — from SentinelOne, Salesforce Ventures, TLV Partners, Tiger Global and Insight. With the funding market drying up and only double-digit customers, Laminar had drawn interest from several buyers including Datadog; CEO Amit Shaked said joining Rubrik meant 'moving faster, rather than stay independent'.

Ransomware turned backup vendors into security vendors — recovery alone no longer resolved attacks.

Hybrid multi-cloud data sprawl made visibility the persistent gap that Laminar's posture management addresses.

Consolidation shrinks customers' vendor contracts and widens Rubrik's revenue funnel as it reportedly prepares for an IPO.

Israel-hatched security startups were being swept up — CrowdStrike-Bionic, IBM-Polar Security, Palo Alto-Cider — as late-stage funding dried up.

When your category's threat evolves, buy the missing capability rather than build it — but expect to pay a multiple set by the buyer queue.

The deal was expected to finalise by the end of 2023, with Laminar's team forming a Tel Aviv R&D centre alongside Rubrik's operations in Bangalore and Palo Alto. TechCrunch heard chatter that some Laminar staff were being let go ahead of closing; both companies declined to comment on those details.