Wasabi announces $30M Series B as cloud storage business continues to grow
We may be in the thick of a pandemic with all of the economic fallout that comes from that, but certain aspects of technology don't change no matter the external factors. Storage is one of them. In fact, we are generating more digital stuff than ever, and Wasabi, a Boston-based startup that has figured out a way to drive down the cost of cloud storage is benefiting from that.
Today it announced a $30 million Series B led led by Forestay Capital, the technology innovation arm of Waypoint Capital with help from previous investors. As with the previous round, Wasabi is going with home office investors, rather than traditional venture capital firms. Today's round brings the total raised to $110 million, according to the company.
While founder and CEO David Friend wouldn't discuss the specific valuation, he did say it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Friend says the company needs the funds to keep up with the rapid growth. We've got about 15,000 customers today, hundreds of petabytes of storage, 2500 channel partners, 250 technology partners - so we've been busy," he said.
He says that revenue continues to grow in spite of the impact of COVID-19 on other parts of the economy. Revenue grew 5x last year. It'll probably grow 3.5x this year. We haven't seen any real slowdown from the Coronavirus. Quarter over quarter growth will be in excess of 40% - this quarter over Q1 - so it's just continuing on a torrid pace," he said.
The challenge for a company like Wasabi, which is looking to capture a large chunk of the growing cloud storage market is the infrastructure piece. It needs to keep building more to meet increasing demand, while keeping costs down, which remains its primary value proposition with customers.
The money will be used mostly to continue to expand its growing infrastructure requirements. The more they store, the more data centers they need and that takes money. It will also help the company expand into new markets where countries have data sovereignty laws that require data to be stored in-country.
The company launched in 2015. It previously raised $68 million in 2018.
Note: This article originally stated this was a debt financing round. The company has clarified that it is an equity round.