A Chat With David Friend, CEO at Cloud Storage Company Wasabi

Wasabi provides simple, predictable and affordable hot cloud storage for businesses all over the world, enabling organizations to store and instantly access an infinite amount of data at 1/5th the price of the competition with no complex tiers or unpredictable egress fees.

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. Our 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, and we’re trusted by over 22,000 customers worldwide.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
We previously founded the backup company Carbonite. So we have over a decade of experience building high speed, low cost, cloud data storage. We invented a new storage architecture that is faster and less expensive than anything on the market while maintaining the same 11 nines of durability as Amazon S3 but at 1/5th the price. And no egress or API charges. We saw an opportunity to use this technology as the basis for a company that would compete effectively in the battle to store all the world’s data in the cloud.
 

What have you learned along the way?

 
The market for cloud data storage appears to be nearly infinite. If you make it simple, fast, reliable, and inexpensive, the world will beat a path to your door. And it’s important to never compete with your customers.
 

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

 
We have grown 3x each of the last 3 years, and growth during the pandemic seemed to accelerate as more people moved applications to the cloud. We also found that we could be more productive working from home than wasting time commuting to an office.
 

What are your plans for the Series C funding?

 
Well, we’ve got quite a few plans! We’ve now raised almost $250m and we’ll be looking to use the latest round of funding to expand our network of resellers, technology alliance partners, and distributors around the world.

We will open data centres in many new international markets and to significantly grow our internal team across all fronts including development, sales, support, marketing, administration and operations. Brand building is a big part of our plans – we want Wasabi to be thought of as the default place to store any kind of data in the cloud.

Our channel partners are our lifeblood, and we are investing heavily in training, marketing materials, MDF, our Partner Portal, and our Partner API that allows our channel partners to integrate Wasabi into their billing systems. There’s always a way to make anything simpler, and we’re constantly looking for ways to make selling Wasabi simpler and more profitable for the channel.
 

What can we hope to see from Wasabi in the future?

 
By the end of 2021, we expect to double the number of our channel partners around the world. We want Wasabi to be available as in-country storage in most of the world’s major markets. We’ll be unveiling a gateway that will allow Wasabi to be used with file-based storage.

We’ll be introducing important new features such as cross-region bucket replication. And we are continuing to invest heavily in the video surveillance market, including storage for both fixed cameras and mobile devices such as police body cams. We will also announce many new technology alliance partners who are either embedding Wasabi storage in their own offerings or are meeting us in our common channel partners in order to provide customers with a complete solution.