Open source object code developer MinIO has appointed its first chief business and marketing officers as AI training and inferencing take hold of enterprise customers.
MinIO didn’t need the classic marketing and business integration functions because it was developer-led, with more than 2 billion Docker pulls and over 50,000 GitHub stars. Its rise since it was founded in 2014 has been led by word of mouth and it provided intense developer support and education, at one time having three simultaneous CTOs. But AI is changing all that, accelerating its penetration of enterprises and requiring what we might call a more gr49own-up stance towards business customers and their CIO and line-of-business IT buyers.
One of the initial signs of this was the November launch of its AIStor product, which encourages the use of object stores to feed AI training and inferencing with a GPUDirect-like facility for S3-stored data. This is bringing it into more direct competition with other AI object data suppliers who talk to business customers via a focused marketing operation and have their internal business-related functions integrated to provide cost-effective, coordinated, and efficient internal operations. This helps bring relevant products to informed customers through competent and skilled sales channels with responsive sales and billing and supply operations.
Another sign of this need has been larger orders. MinIO recorded multiple eight-figure, exabyte-scale customer deals in 2024, with record ARR growth. Garima Kapoor, co-CEO and co-founder, stated: “We are at a pivotal moment in the AI revolution where data infrastructure must support exascale demands that the industry has never seen before.” She sees potential for “aggressive business growth for MinIO in the future” and the company needs a stronger go-to-market function.
So MinIO has appointed Mahesh Patel as its first chief business officer, with Patel having previously been COO at SaaS data protection business Druva, which he joined as CFO in September 2014. It has also hired Erik Frieberg as its first chief marketing officer, coming from stints at Pantheon Platform, Tetrate, solo.io, and Puppet.
MinIO says it has increasing momentum, a strengthened GTM leadership team, “rampant innovation that is raising the bar for AI storage infrastructure, and key collaborations with top AI ecosystem players.” Patel and Frieberg will help it convince enterprises to use MinIO object storage for AI data needs rather than offerings from Cloudian, DataCore, Dell, IBM, HPE, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp, Pure, Scality, StorONE, and VAST Data.
MinIO claims it is “the world’s fastest growing object store” and does not want to relinquish that title to object storage competitors with stronger go-to-market operations for AI buyers.
