Breaking: Online Backup Startup Mozy Acquired By EMC For $76 million
Online storage startup Mozy, headquartered in Utah, has been acquired by EMC Corporation, a public storage company with a nearly $40 billion market cap. EMC paid $76 million for the company, according to two sources close to the deal.
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch reports, citing two sources close to the deal, that EMC Corporation — a public storage vendor with a market cap near $40 billion — has agreed to pay $76 million for Mozy, an online backup startup headquartered in Utah. Neither company has confirmed the transaction, so the figure and terms remain unconfirmed until an official announcement.
The strategic logic visible on its face is a scale mismatch: one of the enterprise storage industry's largest incumbents paying a comparatively small sum for a consumer-facing cloud service, which would mark EMC's entry into online backup through acquisition rather than internal development.
First-order effects
- Mozy's Utah-based team and its consumer backup service would fold into EMC's product portfolio, giving the storage giant an immediate consumer cloud offering instead of a build-from-scratch project.
- Until either party confirms the deal, customers and partners of both firms are left working from sourced reports rather than official statements.
Second-order effects
- A $76 million exit for a consumer online backup startup sets a reference valuation for the category, sharpening acquisition conversations between other independent backup services and larger suitors.
- EMC's enterprise channel gains a consumer and small-business product line it did not previously carry, forcing rivals in storage to decide whether to match with their own cloud backup acquisitions.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer cloud services increasingly reach market inside large infrastructure vendors' portfolios rather than as standalone companies, shifting where innovation and pricing power sit in online storage.
- Enterprise incumbents buying their way into consumer cloud — rather than building — points toward consolidation of the backup category around a handful of large acquirers.
The trend: Enterprise storage incumbents are acquiring consumer cloud backup startups outright rather than building equivalent services internally, pulling the category into consolidation under large vendors.