Last May, Rubrik Inc. Chief Executive Officer Bipul Sinha said during an interview that he expects to take the company public “probably in two or three years.” Today, the data protection startup announced a hire that may represent an initial step toward a stock market debut.

Rubrik this morning revealed that it has appointed veteran finance executive Murray Demo as its first chief financial officer. Murray previously held the same role at collaboration giant Atlassian Corp. Plc, which he led through a successful IPO in 2015. He also served as the CFO of two other publicly traded tech firms, Adobe Systems Inc. and audio hardware powerhouse Dolby Laboratories Inc.

Demo’s hire was announced in conjunction with the news that Microsoft Corp. Chairman John Thompson has joined the Rubrik board. The two appointments follow a year in which the company claims to have seen its annual revenue run rate grow to nearly $300 million. This is quite significant, particularly given how the conventional wisdom on Wall Street holds that a company should have annualized revenues of least $100 million before going public.

Rubrik credits the sales growth to a fourfold increase in the number of companies using its data protection platform over the past 12 months. The offering, which is available in the form of an appliance or a standalone software install, is positioned as an all-in-one solution for managing a company’s backup operations. It also promises to streamline related tasks such as archiving.

Rubrik has lately been working to broaden the product’s feature set even further. Most recently, the company acquired a startup called Datos IO Inc. that had raised $15 million in venture capital. The deal bought Rubrik technology for protecting NoSQL databases and deployments of the popular Hadoop analytics framework.

In an appearance on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE Studio late last year (below), Rubrik Chief Technologist Chris Wahl provided an insider’s perspective on how the company is working to grow its share of the data protection market. “Every quarter we basically have a major or dot release that comes out,” Wahl said.

Image: Rubrik