When Ofir Ehrlich first told us about the idea that would become Eon, he warned us it might sound “incredibly boring.” It was November 2023, a time when many venture firms were focused primarily—even exclusively—on AI, and he knew the category of cloud backup was, to put it mildly, comparatively unsexy.

But not to us.

On that Friday in a bustling Tel Aviv neighborhood, Dean had invited Ofir to join what was originally planned as a one-on-one lunch, and his instinct to introduce Shaun and Ofir had been proven right. They hit it off immediately, bonding over their shared passion for cyber security born of backgrounds working with the U.S. and Israeli military. Then, the discussion turned to Ofir’s vision for a cloud-native backup autopilot—an intriguing proposition for a huge and growing market and, to Dean and Shaun, anything but dull.

While migration to the cloud isn’t new, the rate of growth is: adoption has surged since 2023 to an estimated $234 billion last year, and is expected to more than triple again by 2034. As much as 30% of that total is going to backup—a top priority for companies to ensure continuity, compliance and security. But current solutions rely largely on general-purpose snapshots, which simply duplicate files, regardless of the kind of data they contain.

That makes restoration, when it’s needed, a headache if not a nightmare: recovering a single file often requires recovering an entire snapshot. It can take weeks—a turnaround that may be unacceptable under regulatory demands, not to mention prohibitively expensive.

As the builders of Disaster Recovery and Cloud Migration Services at AWS, Ofir and co-founders Gonen Stein and Ron Kimchi have lived and breathed these problems for years, and they recognized the need for a purpose-built solution. The result is Eon, a next-generation platform that is reinventing cloud infrastructure backup and introducing cloud backup posture management (CBPM).

Eon continuously scans and maps cloud resources, then smartly classifies data across services, and sets backup policies—all automatically. It also offers global, cross-service search and file-level restoration—no more grappling with the whole haystack just to find a needle. And because Ofir, Gonen and Ron designed Eon to sit on top of existing cloud services, their solution is not just more advanced, but more affordable, as well.

Novel as Eon is, it’s no surprise coming from this team, whose decades of experience have made them legends in the Israeli tech industry. In the Israel Defense Forces, Ofir was at the top of the first class of Aram, an elite research program, and remains a well-respected mentor to many founders. Eon is his fourth company, and his second with his co-founders; their team at AWS began as the startup CloudEndure, which after its 2019 acquisition by Amazon, built the largest cloud-native migration and disaster recovery services, serving the world’s largest customers. Like Ofir, Gonen and Ron are outlier leaders who were critical to the unit’s success; Gonen defined a massively successful GTM and product strategy, vastly scaling service adoption, while Ron rose to GM and led one of the largest Amazon engineering teams in Israel.

When we met in November, Ofir planned to hold off on fundraising for a couple of months—but we weren’t the only ones excited about his idea. A week later, Sequoia and Dean were cooperating on what had quickly become Israel’s most competitive seed round, which it was Sequoia’s privilege to lead. We built a relationship with each other, as well as with Eon, and the process eventually led to another kind of partnership: in March, we happily welcomed Dean to the Sequoia team.

Though we knew then that Ofir, Gonen and Ron were special, we hadn’t yet realized just how exceptional they are. In less than a year, they have hired an off-the-charts team, including three dozen of the best engineers in Israel—and their product velocity has been remarkable. Now, as they launch out of stealth and announce these three rounds of funding, it is again our privilege to double down on their Series B and continue supporting that rapid growth. By reimagining the space they knew so well, they have created a new storage layer for the cloud and finally made backups useful. For us and for companies around the world, there’s nothing “boring” about it.