Just three months after raising $27.5m in debt financing, cloud storage provider Wasabi has raised $112m in a C-round.
Total Wasabi funding now stands at $261m. $219m of this is equity financing, selling shares in the business to raise cash.
Wasabi offers S3-compatible public cloud object storage in a single tier. More compellingly, it promises to sell this at 20 per cent of AWS S3’s cost. It doesn’t charge for egress or API requests. However, it is hard to tell if this is due to a correspondingly lower cost base.
The firm said it now has 22,000 customers, up from 15,000 last May, and over 5,000 channel partners around the globe.
CEO and co-founder David Friend said in a statement: “This new funding is a watershed event for Wasabi.
“Storing the world’s data in the cloud is one of the biggest opportunities in the IT industry.”
He added: “We are now well positioned to secure a leadership role in the evolution of the cloud.”
Wasabi claimed, in its announcement, that it was establishing the “first” hyperscale cloud storage architecture. This implies AWS, Azure or Google are doing something else. Possibly their thinking may differ.
Cloud growth
Without mentioning the base figure, nor sales achieved, the CEO said Wasabi’s revenues had tripled for the past three years. He also cited IDC data showing cloud data storage growing 60 per cent year over year to indicate opportunity for growth.
On specific plans for the money, Wasabi said it would expand its network of resellers, technology alliance partners, and distributors. It will also open data centres in new markets, and “significantly” grow its internal team in development, sales, support, marketing, administration and operations.
It will also spend on marketing and marketing support for channel partners. “We will continue to invest in our proprietary software, grow our channel, enhance our brand and expand storage capacity around the world,” said Friend.
The C-round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from existing investors.
