Rubrik pledges more than $500m for the UK and makes London its European base

Rubrik, the US data-security company, said it will invest more than $500m in Britain over the next five years and make London its headquarters for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

The commitment, announced on Wednesday and worth about £375m, lands as governments across the region press companies to keep sensitive information closer to home, a debate over data sovereignty that has moved from technical circles into politics.

The Silicon Valley firm, which listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024, sells software that helps organisations back up their data and recover quickly from ransomware and other attacks. It said the UK had become one of its fastest-growing and most strategically important markets.

The money will fund hiring across sales, marketing, and customer support, along with a new London office and an executive briefing centre for meeting customers and partners. The office, Rubrik said, will offer building-wide amenities including an indoor park, a cafe, a wellness studio, and a rooftop bar, and the firm cast the spending as support for its wider expansion across the region.

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“The UK is one of the world’s leading technology markets,” said Bipul Sinha, Rubrik’s co-founder and chief executive. He said the investment would help European customers “address the critical need for European data sovereignty, quickly recover from cyberattacks, and safely scale AI”.

That reference to sovereignty is doing a lot of work. European regulators and public bodies are increasingly wary of storing critical information on infrastructure controlled by American firms, partly because of laws such as the US CLOUD Act that can compel US providers to hand over data regardless of where it is stored.

Rubrik is leaning into that anxiety. A day before the UK announcement, it said its Security Cloud would become available on the AWS European Sovereign Cloud, aimed at public-sector bodies and regulated industries that want a sovereign path to cyber resilience.

The company pointed to strong recent growth in Britain, saying its UK business had delivered a record first quarter. New customers, it added, included Harbour Energy, Manchester City Council, the Scottish Government, and the insurer Fortegra Financial.

Across EMEA, Rubrik said it now serves about 2,000 customers, nearly half of whom use three or more of its products. The region has become central to a company that competes with rivals such as Cohesity, Veeam, and the incumbents of enterprise backup.

The backdrop is a steady drumbeat of cyberattacks on European organisations, from hospitals and councils to retailers, that have made rapid recovery a boardroom concern rather than an IT footnote. Vendors that promise to restore systems within hours of an attack have found a ready audience among public bodies with little tolerance for downtime.

For Britain, the pledge is another entry in a run of tech commitments. Chipmaker AMD and cloud provider Nebius are among firms that have promised billions for UK infrastructure, and the government has courted private capital to cement London’s status as Europe’s largest tech hub.

Ministers have made “sovereign” cyber and AI capacity a talking point, arguing that resilience is now a matter of national security as much as commercial convenience. A well-known American vendor planting an EMEA flag in London fits that narrative neatly.

The figures deserve a little care. The “$500m” headline is a rounded dollar equivalent of a £375m commitment spread over five years, and much of it covers ordinary operating costs such as salaries rather than a single capital project. Rubrik has not broken down exactly how the money will be split, or how many jobs it expects to create.

Still, the direction is clear. Rubrik is betting that data sovereignty, ransomware recovery, and AI security will keep driving European demand, and it wants London as the base from which to make that pitch to customers and governments alike.