Meet the hot new cloud storage vendor taking on AWS

Wasabi Technologies to go international in the cloud storage market after raising $68m in latest funding round

US-based cloud storage company Wasabi plans to use the $68m (£52m) it has raised in Series B funding to expand globally in an effort to grab market share from Amazon.

The company was founded in 2015 by David Friend and Jeff Flowers before coming out of stealth two years later.

Friend and Flowers also founded data backup software vendor Carbonite in 2005.

Wasabi claims to be 80 per cent cheaper and six times faster than Amazon Web Services' S3 offering and, in a spicy statement, CEO Friend said that he plans to make the company into one of the world's largest cloud storage vendors.

"We are cloud storage experts - our team has been doing it since 2005 when we founded Carbonite," he said.

"Our investors recognise that Wasabi is a technical tour de force that gives us a sustainable advantage in a market that is doubling every two years.

"Fuelled by our new funding from prominent entrepreneurs, financiers, and family offices, Wasabi will go global this year and cloud storage will become a utility like bandwidth or electricity - it will be cheap, fast and available everywhere."

Though it may still be green, the vendor also claims to have 3,000 customers across a wide range of industries, and that many of its early customers are enterprises which are first-time cloud adopters deploying public, hybrid or multi-cloud architectures.

Wasabi claims to have a consistent growth rate of five to 10 per cent a week, with 20 per cent of its business coming from the EU, and plans to open its first European datacentre later this year.

The startup received $8.9m and $10.7m in funding rounds last year, and recently opened a second datacentre in the US.

Sushrutha Sadashiva, an analyst at market researcher Frost and Sullivan, said that Wasabi's product design strategy, combined with its competitive pricing model, sets a benchmark among its peers, and is disrupting the cloud storage framework dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

"Their foresight in recognising that the storage industry will eventually have a one-size-fits-all type of cloud storage allowed the company to develop an affordable storage solution which is capable of accommodating the exponential rise of data inflow in the near future while meeting the needs of a wide range of customers," the analyst said.