Celerity’s acquisition of Silverstring kick-starts a new era for Predatar.
It takes almost 10 days to trek to Everest Base Camp. It’s a difficult journey. The risks of altitude sickness, injury, and physical exhaustion mean that a quarter of adventurers who set out on the journey don’t even make it that far.
As we stand at the foot of our own Everest, we’re allowing ourselves a few moments to reflect on the achievement of getting here – to our own metaphorical base camp – before the adventure gets really interesting.
So how did we get here?
A pioneer was born
The Predatar story started more than a decade ago. Silverstring Limited was – and still is – an innovative Managed Service Provider (MSP) delivering backup and recovery services for enterprises with complex storage environments. Rewind 10 years, and the business was struggling with the challenges of growth. The service delivery team was drowning in repetitive reporting and admin tasks. As the business grew, so did the tasks.
Founder and CEO, Alistair Mackenzie, recognised that automation was the answer. The engineers at Silverstring set about building a tool that would streamline the manual and time-consuming jobs that were impacting productivity. The platform that would soon become known as Predatar was born. User-friendly, flexible, intuitive, in the cloud – the platform was ahead of its time.
It quickly became clear that other MSPs and backup teams inside large organisations could benefit from the pioneering technology that Alistair and his team had built. In 2017, Predatar Limited was born: a SaaS business created under the wing of Silverstring Holdings, to take the product to the world.
The first steps on the journey
Just like the trek to base camp, many start-ups don’t make it. But Predatar has had a big advantage: a strong, knowledgeable, and dedicated companion and guide. Silverstring has been our Sherpa in the early stages of the Predatar journey. Without Silverstring leading the way, those first treacherous climbs wouldn’t have been possible.
In the beginning, Predatar Limited had a great product and big ambitions, but no customers and no revenue. Silverstring helped us take our first steps. With the financial support of an established and profitable business, we recruited the best people. We got stronger.
Silverstring’s knowledge of the market and insights from its customers drove our innovation roadmap and our product development. We got smarter.
Silverstring helped us find our first customers. Our strides got bigger.
A fork in the path
When we started out, customers told us that they were lacking confidence in their backups. Complicated and opaque technology meant they didn’t have visibility of backup success rates or backup run failures. Predatar fixed this for them.
But then the world changed. Suddenly, our customers were asking different questions. The big one – the one that was now keeping them awake at night:
Will our backups be recoverable in a cyberattack?
The Predatar team did what we do best. We innovated. By leveraging our deep technical knowledge in automation for backup and recovery – and by partnering with Trend Micro, a world leader in cyber security technology – we developed the world’s first proactive cyber recovery cleanroom, and software that automates the continuous validation of backups, to prove they are always recoverable and free from malware.
The decision to pivot from a backup and recovery management platform to one that is focused on cyber recovery assurance has been a defining moment in our journey. It was a game changer. We’ve built a product that isn’t just a nice-to-have for businesses – It’s a necessity for operational resilience.
Going our separate ways
So here we are. Our journey to base camp has taken eight years. The role that Silverstring has played in getting us here is without doubt. But it’s time to go our separate ways.
Silverstring, our companion and guide, will go on to have many more adventures – and the next one starts today, as they join the Celerity family. Backed by major capital investor BGF, Celerity Limited is on its own big expedition, and the Silverstring team will bring their unrivalled expertise in backup and recovery assurance services to complement the extensive cyber security and infrastructure capabilities of Celerity. Together, they will reach new heights.
With renewed focus, energy, and investment from the sale of Silverstring Limited, Predatar will continue under the ownership and direction of Alistair Mackenzie.
Our Everest
We’ve already defied the odds to get this far. We’ve created truly a unique technology with patents in the USA, Europe, and the UK.
Last year, our Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) grew by 100%, and the number of businesses using Predatar more than doubled. Today, we’ve got more than 100 customers across North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Australia.
For Predatar, our Everest is scale. We want every business in the world to know the potential of Predatar’s recovery assurance technology for their operations. It’s a big goal for an independent start-up from Oxford, UK – but we’ve never been short of ambition.
Big tech vendors and ambitious startups alike have seen our technology. They’ve seen the opportunity. And they want to catch us. We must stay ahead.
With the summit looming large on the horizon, we’re more than ready to tackle the challenge – and we’ll do it our way. The Predatar way. We will be more agile, more focused, and more daring than ever before.
Every day, we will go further than the last. We’ll move faster. We’ll climb higher. We will remember the journey we have been on. But we won’t look down.
Keep track of our journey
Stay in the loop with all the latest news from Predatar. Get market insights, product news, and practical advice for operational resiliency delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to news
