Veeam CTO Niraj Tolia steps back into advisory role

Veeam CTO Niraj Tolia has stepped back from the role and will continue with the company as a strategic advisor.

He is announcing this via a forthcoming LinkedIn post, which we have seen, saying: “I stepped back from my role as Veeam’s CTO at the end of last year!” For the immediate future, he says: “I will continue supporting Veeam as a Strategic Advisor. Apart from that, I’m going to take some time off to take a deep breath, reflect, and recharge. I will be helping a few startups along the way while I explore and figure out where the next adventure takes me.”

Tolia’s CV tells a classic serial entrepreneur story:

• 2002-2007: PhD, Carnegie Mellon
• 2007-2010: Senior Researcher at HP Labs
• 2010-2014: Chief Architect and then VP Engineering for Maginatics and its MagFS distributed enterprise storage SW (acquired by EMC in 2014)
• 2013-2014: Tech Advisor at Hedvig until EMC acquired Maginatics
• 2014-2016: Senior Director Software Engineering, EMC
• 2017-2020: Co-founder and CEO of cloud-native app backup startup Kasten (acquired by Veeam for $150 million)
• 2020-2022: President and GM for Kasten by Veeam, then SVP Strategy at Veeam
• 2022-2024: Co-founder and CEO of Microsoft 365 Backup-as-a-Service startup Alcion (acquired by Veeam)
• 2024-Jan 2026: CTO at Veeam and now Strategic Advisor

Kasten was founded in January 2017 by CEO Tolia and engineering VP Vaibhav Kamra, who worked together at Maginatics and EMC and had been friends since university. The two also co-founded Alcion. Kamra, who also studied at Carnegie Mellon then worked at Microsoft before joining Maginatics in 2010, became Veeam’s VP and then SVP for Engineering when Veeam acquired Alcion.

By June 2024, prior to the Alcion acquisition, Veeam had a Veeam Data Cloud (VDC) product with a Vault Storage-as-a-Service offering based in Azure and integrated with its Backup and Recovery product. A separate Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 uses Microsoft 365 Backup Storage offering and was embedded inside Veeam’s backup service for Microsoft 365. In February last year, Microsoft took an equity stake in Veeam, bringing Microsoft AI services to Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365, Veeam Data Cloud Vault, and Veeam’s Entra ID identity security and resilience services.

Tolia says VDC is an exabyte-scale SaaS platform, and its annual recurring revenue has increased more than 650 percent since Alcion was acquired. Kasten by Veeam is “further increasing its dominant lead for Kubernetes data resilience,” and Veeam has launched “new products that have shown the fastest growth in Veeam’s history.”

We think Tolia could have another startup in his future, with STaaS, cloud-native resilience, and AI threads possibly weaving together to create an agentic AI backup/resilience service.