Dreeze Launches With $33 Million as the Kedem Brothers Start a Third Recovery Company

Some founders spend a career chasing one big idea. Ziv and Oded Kedem have spent theirs solving the same problem three times over. Their new company, Dreeze, formally launched on November 10 with $33 million in seed funding, SiliconANGLE reported.

Dreeze is the brothers' third recovery company. For founders, the launch is a clear case study in how deep expertise in one problem can become a lasting advantage.

The Funding

According to SiliconANGLE, Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners led the seed round, with participation from Claltech. Dreeze already employs 70 people across Israel and the United States and plans to put the money into product development and a larger sales and marketing team.

A $33 million seed round is large by most standards. Seed rounds of that size tend to go to teams with a track record, and this team has one.

A Track Record in One Problem

SiliconANGLE laid out the history. The Kedem brothers sold Kashya to EMC in 2006. Zerto, the disaster recovery software company they started in 2009, was sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $374 million in 2021. Avi Raichel, the third co-founder of Dreeze, became Zerto's chief operating officer that year, shortly before the sale.

Ziv Kedem is chief executive of Dreeze and Oded Kedem is chief technology officer. Norwest general partner Dror Nahumi said few teams understand the recovery problem "as deeply as this one," according to the report.

That depth is the real asset. Investors are not only backing a product. They are backing founders who have already shown they can build, sell and exit in the same market.

The Problem Dreeze Is Solving

The company focuses on what happens after a backup has done its job. Modern cloud applications depend on infrastructure, identities and secrets as well as data, and all of it has to come back in the right order before an application will run, SiliconANGLE explained.

Dreeze calls the manual work that follows an outage a "recovery scramble." Hunting for credentials and rebuilding connections by hand can keep an application down for days or weeks even after its data is restored. Getting the data back "doesn't mean the business is back," Ziv Kedem said.

The software maps each cloud resource back to the application that depends on it, stores configuration files, keys and data in an immutable, air-gapped vault, and rebuilds everything in dependency order when an outage hits. Teams can also rehearse the full recovery as an automated test without touching production.

Dreeze is generally available now for Amazon Web Services customers. A version for Microsoft Azure is in early access, with general availability planned for early next year.

Lessons for Founders

Stay close to the problem you know. The Kedems did not jump to an unrelated trend. Each company tackled a newer version of the same recovery challenge as technology changed, from on premises systems to virtualisation to cloud native applications.

Let your history do the fundraising. A team that has sold two companies in its field starts every investor conversation with credibility. First time founders cannot borrow that, but they can build it by going deep in one area.

Bring back trusted people. Raichel's move from Zerto to Dreeze shows the value of a co-founder relationship tested under pressure, including through an acquisition.

Name the pain precisely. "Recovery scramble" is a phrase any IT leader recognises. Clear language about a specific problem makes a product easier to buy.

Have a customer voice early. SiliconANGLE quoted Jeremy Miller, chief executive of consulting firm Coravant, who said his firm wanted to work with Dreeze "from the start." Early validation from the field strengthens a launch story.

The Takeaway

Dreeze enters a market crowded with backup vendors, and its success is not guaranteed. The company still has to prove that customers will pay for full application recovery on top of the tools they already own.

What the launch shows clearly is the compounding value of expertise. A founder who learns one problem deeply can return to it again and again, and each time start further ahead.