Wasabi, the hot cloud storage company, has secured USD112 million in Series C funding led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from existing investors.
The round follows Wasabi’s USD27.5 million in debt financing announced in January. The C round brings Wasabi’s total equity financing to USD219 million.
The valuation of the C round was roughly triple the valuation of the company’s most recent equity round, which closed almost exactly one year ago. Wasabi’s revenue and storage under management has also tripled in the last year with deployed storage recently passing one exabyte. The company has 22,000 customers worldwide, and Wasabi’s channel network more than doubled to over 5,000 partners worldwide. The company has data centres in the US, Europe and Japan.
Proceeds from this funding will be used to expand the company’s network of resellers, technology alliance partners, and distributors, open data centres in many new international markets, and to significantly grow its internal team across all fronts including development, sales, support, marketing, administration and operations. 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.
“This new funding is a watershed event for Wasabi,” says Wasabi CEO & Co-Founder David Friend. “With revenues tripling for each of the last three years and over USD100 million 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 is redefining the way businesses think about cloud storage by offering a solution that is one fifth the cost of Amazon S3, has zero fees for egress or API requests and requires no vendor lock-in. With cloud data storage growing 60 per cent year over year, low-cost, highly reliable and infinitely scalable cloud storage is in demand by a wide range of organisations. It’s an ideal product for the channel because every organisation needs to store data, it’s simple to learn to sell, and channel partners enjoy healthy margins. 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.
“The cloud IaaS market has experienced tremendous growth over the last year, primarily fuelled by businesses’ needs to support new ways of working, while also delivering more digital goods and services to customers,” says Andrew Smith, Research Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Services at IDC. “As cloud data migrations, and hybrid cloud adoption continues to accelerate, Wasabi is well positioned to deliver IaaS storage solutions which meet buyer needs for consistent, transparent pricing, as well as integration across multiple cloud and on-premises storage environments.”
JP Morgan Securities LLC served as lead placement agent and Lincoln International served as a co-placement agent to Wasabi in connection with this funding. Foley & Lardner served as counsel to the company.
