Allowing companies to own and easily access their cloud application backup data is what GRAX CEO Joe Gaska set out to do with his company.
Gaska spent years working in the Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity space before venturing off into the SaaS arena. Now, three years after launching GRAX, Gaska believes businesses using his platform see value in their historical data.
“It’s not that I was bored in the IoT market. I got super excited about the data space,” Gaska said. “It wasn’t really even about going into the backup space. It was about, ‘How do customers get the most out of their data that they have or their signals?’”
Gaska thinks readily accessible historical data can provide insight into a company’s future. Rather than keeping your data in a cloud somewhere and never accessing it, he said, it should be analyzed to measure growth rates and spot statistical anomalies.
“There’s all of these things that you can ask historical data, but the first thing you have to do is have all of that history in a place where it’s readily available [and] scalable,” Gaska said.
GRAX not only stores your data for you but can back it up into a customer-owned cloud environment. Gaska calls this a bring-your-own-storage type of backup.
GRAX’s Time Machine feature allows users to see every version of a document or file to prevent overrides or recover info should something bad happen to that data. Major SaaS platforms, including Salesforce and NetSuite, don’t have that feature, Gaska said.
“We are not holding that data and renting access to that data for them,” Gaska said. “We can offer you the service and we'll backup the data, but we'll store it on your disks anywhere that you want.”
Subscription options vary from “good” to “better,” then “best,” and package prices can range from a seven-figure cost to the low five figures.
The goal is for the company to source every single SaaS platform on the market right now. It currently supports Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google Cloud Platform backup data.
Gaska, a Cape Cod native and University of Maine graduate, said he and 45 other full-time employees behind the platform want businesses to understand how backup data can be used as a strategic asset.
GRAX, an Inno on Fire 2020 honoree, has several well-known clients in the fitness, manufacturing and technology spaces. Since 2019, the company’s doubled its workforce and seen 120 percent growth in year-over-year revenue.
Gaska, who’s based in Burlington, credits the relationships he’s made in the Boston startup scene for the success he’s had and loyal coworkers that joined him in establishing GRAX. His entrance into the community took place right out of college, when he worked for OneSource Information Services, which aggregated data.
Gaska later founded the company Ionia and worked with LogMeIn in the Seaport Distrcit after it acquired the data platform Xively, now owned by Google.
With strong roots in Massachusetts, Gaska hopes to find his next investor in Silicon Valley and find other talent on the West Coast and in European countries as more people see the need to access backup history in real time.
“This has been the fastest company I've ever been part of in growth rate from inception to where we are now,” Gaska said. “I'm not interested in kind of grow it and sell it, I'm interested in grow it and build it, cultivate it and kind of really go after the market that's there.”
Jordan Frias is a contributing writer for BostInno.
This article has been updated.
