Less than a month after pulling in $122m in C-round funding, object storage firm Wasabi has opened its pockets again, taking in an extra $25m from two strategic investors to build out the business.
Wasabi offers a single tier of S3-compatible public cloud object storage. It can be viewed as a tier-2 public cloud provider, with AWS, Azure and Google being the tier 1 trio.
Daniel Flynn, president and treasurer at WD’s investment arm, one of the two strategic funders, said: “In the future, most of the world’s data will live in the cloud. We’ve partnered and invested with Wasabi because its mission – to store data in the cloud – aligns with our strategy to partner with cloud customers to provide the foundational technologies underpinning the global data infrastructure.”
David Friend, Wasabi’s CEO and co-founder, said: “We have been using Western Digital disk drives since the founding of the company. Their investment in Wasabi reflects the fact that data storage in the cloud is accelerating and that there is a growing interdependence between our companies.”
The other strategic investor is Aramco Ventures via its Prosperity7 Ventures growth fund.
Friend said: “Companies like Aramco are sitting on mountains of exploration and operational data. Energy, medical imaging and diagnostics, genomics, surveillance and finance are among many industries profiting from the use of AI. The thing to remember, however, is that the value of AI is completely dependent on having a rich source of data. That’s why a company like Wasabi is a natural fit with a company like Aramco.”
The C-round now stands at $137m, with equity funding amounting to $244m. The total funding we have recorded, including debt financing, is $284.2m.
Wasabi has reported three times year-over-year growth, has 23,000 customers and 5,000 channel Partners and Technology Alliance Partners. The new cash will go to Wasabi’s worldwide roll-out of data centres, grow its distribution channels and partner network, and build its management team.
Comment
We are seeing an accelerating rush to build out the infrastructure needed to capture private and public sector organisations’ storage business as they move to the cloud. The hope is that, once captured, customers stay put and Wasabi gets regular subscription revenues. Build it (data centre and channel infrastructure) and they will come seems to be a crude way of describing Wasabi’s strategy. It sees an ingoing migration of storage to the cloud and wants to be right in customers’ sights as they look for a cloud vendor.
