Slide is “bringing back the magic” for MSPs, its CEO claimed after the back-up and disaster recovery (BCDR) disrupter landed in EMEA.
Launched in February 2025 by Datto alumni Austin McChord and Michael Fass, Slide last month used a $70m Series B funding injection to open a UK office and German datacentre.
Led by former Datto EMEA Director Kester Brookes, the UK operation already has five staff.
Talking to IT Channel Oxygen, Slide CEO Fass claimed its BCDR solution is “an order of magnitude faster, more secure, easier to use and modern across every millimetre”.
“We started with the US, moved into Canada six months later, and as we got our sea legs were ready by the end of 2025 to commit to launching in the UK,” he said.
“MSPs are tech people, and they like things to work well. They love our product, and they love the way we’re bringing back that special sauce of channel-only and MSP-caring-and-feeding.
“The UK was the next obvious place for us to plant our seed.”
“Sending out the bat signal”
Having started Datto from his parents’ basement in 2007, McChord became a vocal critic of Datto’s new owner Kaseya after it acquired it in 2022. “It feels like you just bought a leading football team and are in the process of breaking all the players legs,” he wrote in a blog post at the time.
Relations have soured further since the launch of Slide, with Kaseya moving to sue the start-up last September over alleged misappropriation of Datto’s trade secrets.
Fass acknowledged that “most” of Slide’s circa 20 engineers are “friendlies or people who we worked with at Datto”, before quickly stressing that they were all “available”.
“When Datto was sold in 2022, the great culture it was known for really changed, and most of the best engineers and talent in that organisation left or were terminated,” he explained.
“It was as simple as sending out that bat signal.”
Fass joined Datto in 2013 as “the first adult in the building”.
So how does building Slide – which has already grown to 85 staff and 4,000 BCDR devices deployed – compare to the early days of Datto?
“The tech is all different, and the MSPs are mature – we’re selling into a mature marketplace. And it’s brilliant, because the products we provide are orders of magnitude better, more well liked, safer, more secure, faster, more performant and easier to run,” Fass responded.
‘But the other part is that people really missed the magic, the culture and the values.
“We try to make MSPs heroic, and not have to fight us off to protect their own businesses against us. And so that’s a welcome thing in the MSP space nowadays, apparently – which is excruciatingly frustrating – but for us our values are aligned with MSPs.”
“Gosh, darn it, we’re opening a UK datacentre”
Although Slide already recruited “between 20 and 50” EMEA MSPs, that number will scale rapidly to mirror the circa 1,000 MSPs it has on its books in North America, Fass predicted.
Following UK MSP feedback, Slide is now set to open an additional EMEA datacentre in the UK in May, he revealed.
“When MSPs ask us for something they need, we do everything we can to procure that for them,” Fass said.
“We assumed that a German datacentre would be sufficient for the UK and rest of the EMEA region. But we heard from some of our partners in the UK, ‘no, data sovereignty is important to us and we want our data in the UK’ – so gosh, darn it, we’re opening a datacentre in the UK for them.”
COO Carlson Choi echoed this, asserting that Slide’s ability to react quickly to partner feedback is “in our blood”.
“That goes not only for the datacentre, but all the way up to software development – to the point where we may have partners ask for a specific feature,” he said.
“I was talking to a handful of partners at the Dublin roadshow and got asked, ‘do you guys support single sign-on’? By the end of session 45 minutes later, I’d got a text in our slack channel from the product team saying SSO had been tested, fully built, certified and released’.”
BCDR is only the starting point for Slide, Fass indicated.
“We will have other back-up solutions in the market, but we wanted to start with the problem that has the most complexity and neglect associated with it,” he said.
“We will frequently talk about bringing back the magic.
“It just so happens that if you give incredible engineers a year-and-a-half, a blank sheet of paper and a freedom and resources to build the next-generation BCDR product, great things happen.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
