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BOSTON — Wasabi Technologies has reached unicorn status.
The cloud storage company Wasabi Technologies received $250 million in additional funding, pushing the company’s valuation over $1.1 billion, according to the company last month.
The lead investor L2 Point Management helped Wasabi raise $125 million in Series D equity. Other investors in the round included Cedar Pine, Forestay Capital, and Fidelity Management & Research Company. Wasabi also expanded a debt facility with MGG Investment Group to $125 million.
Wasabi’s total funding to date is $536.2 million, after 14 total rounds of funding, according to Crunchbase. The company raised $112 million in Series C financing in April 2021.
The new round of funding will help Wasabi expand its customer reach, according to Kerstin Dittmar, a managing partner at L2 Point.
“Wasabi provides a game-changing product that offers customers a simpler, faster, and significantly more economical solution to their cloud data storage needs,” she said. “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.”
@L2Point_ is proud to lead the $125M Series D for @wasabi_cloud alongside Cedar Pine, @CerberusCapital, @Fidelity, Forestay Capital, and Prosperity7 Ventures. Congratulations to the entire Wasabi team! https://t.co/GLFM1lKeO2
— Kerstin Dittmar (@Kerstin_Dittmar) September 27, 2022
Wasabi has over 40,000 customers in over 100 countries. It has 13 storage regions in North America, Asia Pacific, and Europe, including Amsterdam, Germany, Japan, and Singapore.
In 2022, Wasabi is making significant strides in regional availability: this January, it announced the opening of a storage region in Paris; in May, it opened a storage region in Sydney. The company opened other storage regions in 2021.
Boston-based Wasabi was founded in 2015 by the co-founders of Carbonite, David Friend and Jeff Flowers. Wasabi believes its single focus on the cloud storage segment of the data storage market helps the company specialize in the technology.
Wasabi offers hot cloud storage to enterprises, which is an object storage solution intended to eliminate storage tiering. Wasabi aims to provide both cold storage and frequent-access storage at higher access speeds than traditional storage systems. The company says it does not charge users extra for egress or API requests.
Wasabi’s singular focus on cloud storage
Wasabi has also added Dittmar of L2 Point as a new member to its eight-person board of directors, which includes founders Flowers and Friend.
Wasabi co-founder and CEO David Friend addressed how the funding round further emphasizes Wasabi’s dominance in cloud storage specifically.
“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,” said Friend. “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.”
Wasabi’s partners
Wasabi partners with over 350 organizations that specialize in technologies like backup and disaster recovery (DR). Some of Wasabi’s partners include Nutanix, Veeam, MSP360, and Rubrik.
Wasabi also partners with channel organizations to market and sell its hot cloud storage. It works with value-added resellers (VARs) and system integrators, wanting to partner with organizations that help their customers with the full cycle of storage transformation. This includes storage assessments and migration assistance.
Growth of the cloud storage market
The cloud storage market is expected to grow from $83.41 billion in 2022 to $376.37 billion in 2029, according to a report from Fortune Business Insights.
Major market players include Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Microsoft, and Oracle.
Over the past year, other storage startups have also seen successful rounds of financing: cloud storage provider Lucidity announced a recent round of seed funding, raising $5.3 million. And earlier in 2022, NVMe-oF provider Pavilion Data Systems announced it raised $45 million in funds.
