US-based hot cloud storage company Wasabi Technologies has finally joined the unicorn club after raising $250M in funding. Wasabi has now raised $495M in total, valuing the company at more than $1.1B.
Amazon and other so-called “hyperscalers,” such as the Microsoft Azures, Google Cloud Platforms, and IBM Clouds of the world, continue to dominate the cloud services market. According to Synergy Group, a company that conducts IT market research, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google collectively held a 65% share of the global cloud services market as of Q2, up 61% year over year.
As per the company press release, Wasabi will split the latest Series D round equally between equity and debt investments ($125M each). In addition to Cedar Pine and return investors Fidelity Management & Research Company and Forestay Capital, L2 Point Management led the group.
Geographical expansion
The new capital will fuel Wasabi’s expansion into new vertical markets and geographies, strengthen channel partnerships, and scale the company’s go-to-market team and global brand strategies. Meanwhile, the debt will be used to fund capital equipment and infrastructure in Wasabi’s storage regions around the world, as well as to invest in Wasabi’s technological capabilities in order to lay the groundwork for a new generation of cloud storage architecture.
Founded by David Friend and Jeff Flowers in 2015, Wasabi offers businesses all over the world with cost-effective cloud data storage at one-fifth the cost of large hyper-scale providers or on-premises storage, with no charges for egress or API requests and no complex tiering. From 2020 to 2021, the company claims that its revenues got more than double, and Wasabi now has over 40,000 customers in over 100 countries, 13,000 partners, 250+ global employees, and 13 storage regions spread across North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.
Wasabi was founded by Friend and Flowers in 2015, while Friend was still the CEO of the cloud backup company Carbonite. Flowers, who had previously worked at Carbonite, had been developing Wasabi with a number of the company’s founding engineers when he eventually persuaded Friend to join the project.
Who uses Wasabi to store data?
Wasabi partners with over 350 tech firms, including the majority of the top backup, disaster recovery, and surveillance firms in the world, in addition to providing cloud storage with performance. Professional sports, energy and natural resources, finance, security, education, manufacturing, consumer technology, healthcare, scientific research, media and entertainment, as well as other industries, use Wasabi to store data.
The monthly pay-as-you-go rate for Wasabi is $5.99 per terabyte. In addition, the business provides reserved capacity pricing with a 30-day retention policy that enables clients to buy 50 terabytes or more for terms of one, three, or five years.
“Closing a large up round in this environment speaks to the spectacular growth of Wasabi, the magnitude of the cloud storage opportunity, and our leadership as the industry’s largest pure-play cloud storage vendor. At Wasabi, we focus on just one thing: cloud storage. We do it better than anyone else in the industry. Because of this singular focus, our team has achieved best-in-class performance and security at the lowest prices in the industry,” said David Friend, co-founder and CEO of Wasabi Technologies.
Kerstin Dittmar, managing partner of lead investor L2 Point, will join Wasabi’s Board of Directors. “Wasabi provides a game-changing product that offers customers a simpler, faster, and significantly more economical solution to their cloud data storage needs. We believe this capital raise will allow Wasabi to continue to expand its offering across additional services and geographies to meet their global customers’ needs,” said Dittmar.
“We are proud to partner with Wasabi to provide innovative solutions in cloud storage and security,” added Sam Barnett, PhD, executive chairman of Cedar Pine. “The importance of Wasabi’s technology is increasing in every industry.”
Kevin Griffin, CEO of MGG Investment Group, also commented, “We seek to partner with best-in-class entrepreneurs and companies and are excited to continue supporting Wasabi Technologies and their global expansion.”
“As our data needs continue to evolve, from player analytics, IoT, digital assets and even security, this presents an enormous learning opportunity for the organization,” said Brian Shield, senior vice president and CTO of the Boston Red Sox. “Wasabi provides a cost-effective cloud-based solution that enables us to retrieve content quickly and improve the level of video analysis and production we do here at the Red Sox.”
