Cloud Storage Company Wasabi Raises $112 Million

By Annie Baker • May 16, 2021
  • Cloud storage company Wasabi announced recently it has raised $112 million in Series C funding. These are the details.

Cloud storage company Wasabi announced recently it has raised $112 million in Series C funding led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from existing investors. This round of funding follows Wasabi’s $27.5 million in debt financing announced in January. The C round brings Wasabi’s total equity financing to $219 million.

The valuation of the C round was about triple the valuation of the company’s most recent equity round – which had closed about a year earlier. And Wasabi’s revenue and storage under management has also tripled in the last year with deployed storage recently passing one exabyte. The company currently has 22,000 customers worldwide and Wasabi’s channel network more than doubled to over 5,000 partners worldwide. Wasabi has data centers in the US, Europe and Japan.

The proceeds from this funding will be used to expand the company’s network of resellers, technology alliance partners, and distributors, open data centers in many new international markets, and to grow its internal team across all fronts including development, sales, support, marketing, administration and operations. And the company will also use the proceeds to make further investments in building its brand internationally and providing additional marketing support for its channel partners.

Wasabi has been redefining the way businesses think about cloud storage by offering a solution that is 1/5th the cost of Amazon S3, has zero fees for egress or API requests and requires no vendor lock-in. And with cloud data storage growing 60% year over year, low-cost, highly reliable, and infinitely scalable cloud storage is in demand by a wide range of organizations. 

It is considered an ideal product for the channel since every organization needs to store data, it’s simple to learn to sell, and channel partners enjoy healthy margins. And Wasabi’s rapidly expanding customer base stores every imaginable type of data ranging from backups, DR and archiving to surveillance, medical imaging, big science, education, genomics, AI/ML data lakes, television, movies and government data.

KEY QUOTES:

“This new funding is a watershed event for Wasabi. With revenues tripling for each of the last 3 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. 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. We will continue to invest in our proprietary software, grow our channel, enhance our brand and expand storage capacity around the world.”

— Wasabi CEO & Co-Founder David Friend

“The cloud IaaS market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year, primarily fueled by businesses’ needs to support new ways of working, while also delivering more digital goods and services to customers. As cloud data migrations and hybrid cloud adoption continues to accelerate, Wasabi is well-positioned to deliver IaaS storage solutions that meet buyer needs for consistent, transparent pricing, as well as integration across multiple cloud and on-premises storage environments.”

— Andrew Smith, Research Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Services at IDC