Cloud storage startup Wasabi has completed a huge funding round – $68 million, coming after $8.9m and $10.8m A and B-rounds last year. It’s called a B-round and so will be part of the $10.8m 2017 B-round exercise. Total funding now stands at $87.7m, according to our calculations.
The round was not fuelled by traditional VCs. Investment came instead from industry veterans and family offices.
Established in 2017 by David Friend and Jeff Flowers, the founders of Carbonite, Wasabi will use the cash to accelerate growth. It intends to rapidly expand internationally, opening its first European data centre later this year, and invest in product development.
CEO David Friend said: “Wasabi will go global this year and cloud storage will become a utility like bandwidth or electricity – it will be cheap, fast and available everywhere.”
Wasabi’s mission is to become the world’s largest cloud storage company. Set your sights high, why don’t cha?
Its marketing pitch is simple; “No more tiers. Pay one low price that’s 80% less than Amazon S3.”
In March 2018 I noted: “Wasabi is AWS S3 bit-compatible, and costs a flat $.0039/GB/Month with a 1TB minimum usage. It also offers immutable buckets.” Wasabi claims its service is 6x the speed of S3, and there are no data egress fees.
The company has signed up more than 3,000 customers spanning multiple industries in just over a year since launch. It claims revenue is currently growing five to 10 per cent per week and has opened a second data centre in the USA to support media and entertainment industry and customers from Asia. It says 20 per cent of customers are based in the EU, acquired with next-to-no marketing.
Analyst Sushrutha Sadashiva at Frost & Sullivan provided this canned quote for Wasabi: “Their foresight in recognising that the storage industry will eventually have a one-size-fits-all type of cloud storage allowed the company to develop an affordable storage solution which is capable of accommodating the exponential rise of data inflow in near future while meeting the needs of a wide range of customers.”
Will the storage industry have a one-size-fits-all type of cloud storage? That seems unlikely. It could be all horse radish but let’s see first how Wasabi grows. Can it get to such a size that AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform respond?
