Pomegra
Zerto founders' Dreeze exits stealth with a $33M seed from Norwest and Bessemer to restore entire cloud applications, not just data, starting with AWS.
Key Takeaways
- Dreeze raised a $33M seed led by Norwest and Bessemer Venture Partners, with Claltech also participating.
- The platform restores whole cloud applications; AWS is generally available and Azure follows in early 2027.
- The three founders previously built Zerto, sold to HPE in 2021, and Kashya, sold to EMC in 2006.
Lead
Dreeze emerged from stealth on November 10, 2026, with a $33 million seed round led by Norwest and Bessemer Venture Partners. Claltech also took part. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Alongside the funding, Dreeze announced general availability of its Application Revival platform for AWS. The product targets a gap in cloud backup: restoring data is one task, and getting a working application back online is another.
What Does Dreeze Actually Sell?
Dreeze sells automated recovery of complete cloud-native applications, including the infrastructure, configurations, identities, secrets, keys and connections that sit around the data. Conventional backup tools return the data and leave operators to rebuild everything else by hand.
The company describes four components. Autonomous dependency mapping discovers how an application's resources connect. Vaulted backup stores data, configurations and keys in immutable, air-gapped storage, with optional regional replication. Revival automation then restores resources in dependency order, and automated end-to-end testing checks that a recovery would work before an outage forces the question.
The product displaces the manual runbooks and scripted rebuilds that many teams rely on today, as well as backup tools that stop at the data layer. Pricing was not disclosed.
Who Is Behind the Company?
Dreeze was founded in 2025 by CEO Ziv Kedem, CTO Oded Kedem and COO Avi Raichel. The same three founded Zerto in 2009, a continuous data protection company that HPE acquired in 2021. Before that, they started Kashya, which EMC bought in 2006.
The company operates across Israel and the United States and has 70 employees. That is a sizable headcount for a seed-stage company, and it suggests most of the $33 million is committed to engineering and go-to-market work already under way.
Why Does a $33M Seed Matter?
The round size reflects the founders' record more than the company's age. A 2025 startup raising $33 million at seed, from two large multistage investors, is a bet on a team that has already sold two companies in the same category. Investors are paying for repeat execution in data protection, since Dreeze has little revenue history to price.
The skeptical reading is that the thesis is still unproven at scale. Dreeze offers one public customer reference so far, Coravant, whose CEO Jeremy Miller said recovery is what worries customers: getting a whole application running again with every dependency in the right order. A single quote does not show how the platform behaves across sprawling estates with thousands of resources.
The round also leaves the next step open. With no disclosed valuation, the market has no benchmark for what a Series A would need to show beyond AWS.
How Does This Fit the Backup Market?
Backup vendors have spent years adding ransomware protection, immutability and cloud coverage. Dreeze argues that this still leaves a "recovery scramble" that can keep an application offline for days or even weeks after the data returns. That is the company's own framing, and the evidence for it will come from recovery-time results in customer production environments.
The AWS focus is a practical choice. Dependency mapping is hard enough on one provider's APIs, and each cloud has its own identity, key management and networking models. Multi-cloud coverage will test whether the architecture generalizes or needs rebuilding for each provider.
What Comes Next?
Microsoft Azure support is in early access, with general availability planned for early 2027. Google Cloud was not mentioned in the announcement. Customer wins in regulated sectors, where tested recovery matters for audit purposes, would be the clearest early signal of demand.
Competition is likely to come from established backup vendors extending into application-level recovery, and from cloud providers' native tooling. Dreeze's founders know those incumbents well, having sold to two of them.
Outlook
Dreeze enters the market with $33 million, a proven founding team and a shipping AWS product. What it lacks is a public record of recoveries at scale and a disclosed valuation. The Azure launch in early 2027 and the first named enterprise deployments will show whether application-level revival becomes its own product category or a feature that larger vendors absorb.
