Slide, an early-stage BCDR company launched by former Datto founder Austin McChord and former Datto general counsel chief people officer Michael Fass, announced that it has raised $25 million in Series A funding. With the funding, the founders want the MSP community to know they’re in it for the long term.
The round was led by Base10 Partners, with participation from the Outsiders Fund, McChord’s early-stage venture capital firm, and Top Down Ventures.
“It is an important stake in the ground for us to provide confidence to our team and to our partners that we are building this thing to last and that we’re investing deeply in the space,” Fass tells MSP Success.
McChord, echoing that, says that while the Series A funding will be used to scale Slide’s platform development, operations, and expansion into Canada, the funding “is more a way for us to send a message to the market that this isn’t a hobby; that we’re serious about this and we’re committed to this for the long term.”
Slide Expansion Plans
With an R&D team that includes some other Datto alumni and an investment from the Outsiders Fund, the startup first came out of stealth in February with the Z1 appliance. Today, the firm has three appliance models. And McChord and Fass tell MSP Success that Slide now has 25 employees with more than 150 MSP partners using their appliances.
They expect that number to grow, with MSPs that have tried the appliance adopting more in their fleet. “Our approach toward winning their business, winning their trust, is to start small,” Fass says. “Buy a device. See what it’s like. Put us through our paces. See what happens when there’s a problem, because you know this is technology and there’s problems from time to time, right? What’s it like to call support?” What’s it like to experience the user interface?” He adds, “We want them to put the product, our company, our team, through the paces.”
Says McChord, “When we launched Slide, our thought was, can we bring innovation to the BCDR space? We felt like the large vendors had stopped moving the ball forward on the product and on the technology and Slide showed up and delivered on that product and technology… We’re selling to more partners than we have expected to out of the gate.”
With the funding announcement, Datto is officially launching its data center in Canada and will be accepting MSP partners, Fass says. “There’s a lot of folks lined up ready to get started to work with us. And so we’re really excited about that. That’s going to put a lot of additional gas in the tank for the company.”
As for product development, Fass says they’re giving larger MSPs the ability to work with co-managed clients, and are planning updates to their encryption technology.
Challenges of Being a Startup in a Turbulent Economy
MSP Success asked Fass about the challenges of tariff uncertainty and being early stage. “Tariffs suck. That’s the biggest take away,” he says. “They just hurt businesses, and ultimately, they hurt all consumers of business products.”
He says they have had to navigate some supply chain issues. “I’m spending more time than I should be on the basic blocking and tackling of procuring products so that we can provide our services to our partners. That’s time I could be spending doing things that are more value add. That’s frustrating.”
Meanwhile, he says that they have not passed on price increases to MSPs. “We’re in somewhat of a privileged position, but at the same time we’re eating some of that profit that we could otherwise be making. It’s important for us to get the product out there and so we’re accepting some of that. We’re well financed and well stocked, so we can we can handle it.”
What’s Ahead for Slide
Asked if the long-term road map is to grow to a platform company with other products MSPs use, Fass says, “Our focus is on our mission, which is we want to back up MSPs. We want to back up business data wherever it lives. That’s an audacious goal, and we want to do it with excellence. Until we’ve reached that horizon, I wouldn’t want to expand beyond that right now.”
Adds McChord, “The thing that motivates us every day is that this is just the beginning as far as the technology road map, as far as the features and functionality that we can deliver. So we’re moving to get more and more stuff shipped faster and faster and we’ve gotten so much feedback from partners and it’s helped us prioritize what really matters to them … and then working with our engineering teams to deliver that.”
