Wasabi, a fast-growing cloud storage startup out of Boston, announced Thursday it closed on a massive $112 million Series C led by Fidelity Management & Research Company. This round brings the company’s total funding raised to nearly $220 million, and is a “watershed event” for its future, says CEO and co-founder David Friend.
“With revenues tripling for each of the last three years and over $100M of new investment led by one of the world’s largest and most prestigious financial institutions, our customers will know that their data is in the hands of a reliable, fast-growing company with the substantial resources to meet their growing needs,” Friend said in a statement.
Founded in 2016, Wasabi aims to offer cloud storage that is faster, cheaper and more secure than anyone else in the space — including (and especially) Amazon S3. In fact, the company says it lets organizations store and instantly access an infinite amount of data for just one-fifth of the cost of Amazon S3, without any complex tiers or egress fees.
The larger cloud data storage industry has grown quite a bit in the last year, mainly because businesses have had to support remote work and deliver more digital goods and services to customers. Meanwhile, demand for Wasabi has grown too. The company says its revenue and storage under management has tripled in the last year, with deployed storage recently passing one exabyte. Its channel network also more than doubled to about 5,000 partners worldwide.
Wasabi now has 22,000 customers and data centers in the United States, Europe and Japan, and plans to use this fresh funding to further build its brand internationally. It will also use the money to expand its network of resellers, technology alliance partners and distributors, as well as open new data centers. The company is hiring too, with plans to “significantly grow” its team across the board, including development, sales, marketing and operations.
Long term, Friend has big plans for Wasabi (even hinting at a potential IPO down the line to TechCrunch), and says he believes the company is poised to be a leader in the cloud storage industry.
“Storing the world’s data in the cloud is one of the biggest opportunities in the IT industry, and we are now well positioned to secure a leadership role in the evolution of the cloud,” Friend continued. “We will continue to invest in our proprietary software, grow our channel, enhance our brand and expand storage capacity around the world.”
