Cloud storage unicorn Wasabi says it has reached the 100,000 customer point after continuing sales growth.
The company has raised a total of $500 million since its inception in 2017, and gained unicorn status in 2022, after raising $250 million, which included a 50/50 investment and credit facility.
Since then, it has seen 60-70 percent annual revenue growth and its partner numbers have also just reached 15,000 globally.
On the IT Press Tour of Boston and Massachusetts this week, David Friend, the company’s founder and CEO, said: “Cloud storage is an infinite market, and you have to try and dominate it as quickly as possible.”
Wasabi, of course, is very much smaller than its hyperscale cloud service rivals AWS, Azure and Google, but its strategy of basing its service on a rival to AWS S3 cloud storage appears to be gaining traction. It claims its offer can be up to 80 percent cheaper than AWS, saying it only charges for the amount of data users store in its cloud, with no extra charges for moving it in and out of that cloud, or any other operational charges.
Friend also claims similar savings can be made if customers choose to put more of their data into Wasabi’s cloud instead of buying more large on-premise storage boxes, over a five-year contract period, when maintenance support fees and the overall cost and depreciation of those boxes is taken into account.
As for building up sales, Wasabi is a channel company and has a simple formula to getting to the best partners globally. “When we are entering a market, the first thing we do is sign up the best distributors in that market, before any rivals get there,” says Friend.
“Once those distributors’ resellers have invested in our systems, benefited from the marketing and development funds, training, integration, etc, when the next guy comes along and asks to work with them instead, they’ll say ‘why should I, I’m working with Wasabi already’.”
He added: “It’s an easy channel model, ‘How much storage do you want, and for how long’. $6.99 per TB per month, that’s the list price.”
As a private company, Wasabi doesn’t release its annual sales figures, but some analysts put these at around $135 million last year, so if the current annual growth continues, it could be around $230 million in 2024. One way or another, Friend told the IT Press Tour that Wasabi believes it has the first $1 billion-revenue year within its sights, or, “within five years” anyhow.
Friend is also a fan of going public too. “We’d like to be a public company. At Carbonite [where he was co-founder and CEO at the backup firm] we became a public company, and more people took us seriously. It’s good to have a public profile, it can help.”