Wasabi isn’t just that green stuff that tastes like horseradish and clears out your sinuses.
It’s also the name of one of Boston’s hottest storage companies, which plans to take on the likes of Amazon. Co-founded in 2015 by “the dynamic duo of cloud storage,” Jeff Flowers and David Friend, Wasabi aims to offer storage faster, cheaper and more securely than anyone else.
And if anyone can make that happen, it’s Flowers and Friend, co-founders of Carbonite, one of the world’s leading cloud storage companies. Together, the pair has over three decades of storage innovation under their belt.
What makes Wasabi different from other storage companies is that it aims to “commoditize” cloud storage, ditching old-fashioned storage tiers and sneaky pricing schemes to give customers an easier and more cost-effective experience.
To that end, they offer “drag and drop” storage for IT professionals, as well as Mac and Window users, for one-fifth of the cost of Amazon S3, and according to Friend — it’s six times faster.
“Talk about an easy product to sell,” Friend said. “It’s like someone offering a roundtrip ticket to Paris for $100.”
So far, Wasabi’s customers seem to agree. The company’s offerings have attracted more than 1,500 paying customers, and Wasabi has been growing its storage by 7 to 10 percent week over week.
“We’re just trying to keep up,” Friend added.
On Wasabi’s website, the co-founders explain that they decided to take on Amazon because they saw an opportunity to build a great company that changes the economics of cloud storage.
“We love David and Goliath stories, like Nucor taking on U.S. Steel, MCI taking on AT&T, or Apple taking on IBM,” they write.
By the time Friend and Flowers left Carbonite, they were backing up over 500 million new files every day and had hundreds of petabytes of storage, beating out big competitors like Iron Mountain, EMC and HP.
While Wasabi’s future is still unclear, its co-founders are confident that they will make cloud storage as “inexpensive and reliable as electricity.”
Stay tuned.
