DURHAM — If you’ve ever struggled to name a project, you’re not alone. The founders of Arpio spent two full days in front of a whiteboard, trying to nail down a name for their SaaS company. They eventually just wrote down the key metrics of disaster recovery and made up the clever word that’s the pronunciation of one of the acronyms.
Doug Neumann, co-founder and CEO of Arpio sees the name as a kind of easter egg for those in the industry. (Sorry! Not going to give it away.)
Cloud Insurance
Arpio is the brainchild Neumann and co-founder Shaw Terwilliger, who worked together at Microsoft and Bandwidth. Neumann was with Bandwidth for their IPO and decided to use his “fun money” to try a different career experience: founder.
Neumann wanted a partner and didn’t have to look far before deciding on Terwilliger.
“Shaw was far and away the standout. [He and I] worked together in many different contexts and he’s just the best engineer I’ve ever had on my team.”
Their time spent at Bandwidth provided crucial insight. While leading the software team, Neumann’s staff had to solve disaster recovery for themselves, as they pushed the envelope of cloud adoption. This effort was time-consuming and Neumann recognized that it was code that could be reused for others.
“Fundamentally, it’s like building insurance, you hope you’ll never need it, but it’s there in case the cloud goes down. And so we just kind of recognized that you could build this in a general-purpose manner. So that people like Bandwidth wouldn’t have to build it themselves.”
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False Start
Disaster recovery was not actually their first product.
Initially, the duo worked on a completely different startup idea aimed at improving employee experiences during on-call rotations. However, after failing to gather enough early adopters, they decided to walk away from that venture. Neumann still recalls that false start with fondness.
“We walked away from that idea, but I still someday, somebody’s gonna go do this and it’s going to be a great product for someone.”
Their subsequent pivot led to the inception of Arpio in 2019. They had just begun bringing on their first customers in early 2020 when the pandemic hit.
“[The] pandemic was not a great time to be trying to bring a new product to market while people were busy trying to figure out a lot of other problems,” Neumann noted.
The cofounders instead spent much of the year consulting, but acceptance into the Y Combinator accelerator in late 2020 got them geared up to hit the gas in 2021. The company reincorporated as a Delaware C Corp and began bringing in new clients and expanding their supported Amazon service coverage. Arpio has tripled its revenue in the past year and is primed for its next phase of growth.
New Horizons
Having navigated the ups and downs of early development and weathering the challenges posed by the pandemic, Arpio now stands on the cusp of new horizons. Last week the company filed with the SEC for $8.2 million in seed round financing, notable in a tight economy and challenging year for funding.
Neumann is clear on his plans for the money. The first step is building the company’s go-to-market strategy.
“We’ve built a great product. Our customers love it. What we haven’t really invested in is the go-to-market side of the business. So we have no marketing staff,” Neumann explained. “We need to go build out the non-product capabilities so that we can bring this to market and scale it from that perspective.”
On the technical side, the next steps involve fine-tuning some Amazon service coverage, but Neumann is largely happy with the product on this front.
“We have, like, four times the service coverage of anybody else in the market. I think it’s what really makes our product unique. There are a lot of backup and disaster recovery solutions out there. But most of them don’t understand the cloud complexity problem and Arpio is built to understand that bigger picture of what it takes to recover cloud workload.”
Neumann has another milestone in mind: expanding their disaster recovery solutions to the Microsoft Azure Cloud environment. While plenty of AWS users are happy to develop their own disaster recovery solutions, the Azure market represents more of a “set-it-and-forget-it” customer base for which Arpio would be an ideal solution.
“Each of these clouds has different needs slightly different needs. AWS is the largest. Azure is meaningfully smaller, but the Azure customer is a really good fit for our ideal customer profile.,” Neumann noted.
That said, the Azure development is on hold until the team is able to expand the market and customer support side. Neumann aims to work on that this fall and then look into additional development in the new year. He estimates another round of funding in about 18 months. Considering that this round was expanded to bring on additional investors and was over-subscribed, he should be in good shape for future investment and hiring.
So if you wind up on a call with the Arpio team, think about that name. If you can work out the acronym there just might be a prize in it for you.
