The Idea: In 2006, Ariel Berkman had just left Unit 81 - one of the Israeli military's most elite intelligence technology units. Instead of joining a VC-backed startup like most of his peers, he co-founded Recover Information Technologies, a tiny shop in Herzliya, Israel that recovered data from broken hard drives, damaged discs, and corrupted memory cards. For eight years, the company served roughly 50 SMB customers paying around $100 a month. It was a solid, unglamorous business - the digital equivalent of a locksmith. But Berkman and his team had been quietly experimenting with something bigger: cloud data protection. They'd built a side project for backing up Salesforce data, and they'd just landed their first enterprise customer - a nearly six-figure deal protecting 3,000 seats. They had no idea that a chance encounter in a coffee shop was about to change everything. This was the beginning of Own Company.
The Execution:
- 2006: Ariel Berkman co-founds Recover Information Technologies after leaving Unit 81. The company recovers data from physical media - hard drives, discs, memory cards - for SMBs in Israel.
- 2006-2014: Eight years of grinding. ~50 customers paying ~$100/month. The team builds deep expertise in data recovery and begins experimenting with cloud backup as a side project.
- October 2014: Sam Gutmann, CEO of cloud backup company Intronis, is on a family vacation in Israel. A friend mentions some founders working on a "backup company." Gutmann asks the tour van driver to pull over in Herzliya so he can walk into a coffee shop and meet them. That meeting changes the trajectory of the company. Gutmann joins as CEO.
- 2015: The company rebrands to OwnBackup and pivots entirely to Salesforce data protection. They bet the whole company on a single ecosystem - protecting the data that businesses store in Salesforce's cloud.
- 2019-2021: The bet pays off. OwnBackup raises $167.5M in a Series D (Jan 2021), then $240M in a Series E at a $3.35B valuation (Aug 2021). The company now serves 7,000+ customers across the Salesforce ecosystem.
- 2022-2023: Expands beyond Salesforce into broader SaaS data protection - Microsoft Dynamics 365, ServiceNow, and more. Rebrands to simply "Own." The total addressable market expands dramatically.
- September 2024: Salesforce acquires Own for $1.9B in cash - their second-largest acquisition in history, after the $27.7B Slack deal. The hard drive recovery shop from Herzliya becomes the backbone of Salesforce's data protection strategy.
The lesson? Sometimes the biggest outcomes come from the least obvious starting points. Berkman spent eight years recovering data from broken hard drives before a chance coffee shop meeting with a stranger on vacation redirected everything. He then bet his entire company on a single platform - Salesforce - at a time when conventional wisdom said to diversify. Eighteen years of patient building, one bold ecosystem bet, and one lucky meeting turned a data recovery shop into a $1.9B exit.