Storj names new CEO to continue distributed storage mission

Distributed cloud storage firm Storj has a new CEO. Colby Winegar has been promoted to the role after previously serving as chief revenue officer.

Colby Winegar, Storj
Colby Winegar

Prior to Storj, Winegar co-founded and led CrowdStorage, another distributed cloud storage player. He was also previously at Vivint Smart Home.

Ben Golub, outgoing Storj CEO and current executive board chairman, said: “Colby has been instrumental to Storj’s most significant developments, including the acquisitions of Valdi and PetaGene this year, cultivating outstanding customers, and building an award-winning partner ecosystem.”

Golub has served as CEO and executive chair for over six years. The process of shifting responsibilities to Winegar is said to have begun six months ago. Golub will continue as executive chair.

Storj reckons its distributed solutions yield “up to” 90 percent lower costs and 83 percent less carbon emissions for customers. Winegar said: “With AI adoption accelerating across industries, enterprises need new solutions to manage skyrocketing amounts of data, while innovating more rapidly, affordably, and sustainably.

“As CEO, I will continue leading the company’s direction together with technical alliance partners, customers, and resellers, which increasingly recognize the transformative capabilities Storj delivers.”

Storj’s S3-compatible storage architecture uses unused capacity distributed across drives and datacenters in more than 100 countries and over 20,000 points of presence. It also provides GPUs on-demand via its distributed global network, and offers a client mount, so customers can treat file storage the same as object storage and vice versa.

Winegar was Storj senior vice president, business development, from June 2022 to April 2023. He then took the chief business development job up to January 2024, before being appointed CRO.

To fill the CRO role, Storj recently hired a leader for the direct sales organization and promoted an internal person to run the channel sales team; both report directly to Winegar.

In August, Storj said it had “made access to AI compute a bit easier” by working with CUDOS. CUDOS is a DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure network) for AI and Web3 applications and workloads. It has access to hard-to-get H100 chips, we’re told, and the latest liquid-cooled H200 chips from Nvidia, which support AI workloads.