Wasabi Lands $68M in Series B

Wasabi, the hot cloud storage company, today announces the closing of a Series B financing round totaling $68 million. Wasabi refrained from conventional venture capital, preferring instead to raise money from industry veterans and family offices. The investment is a testament to Wasabi's progress in becoming a leading vendor of cheap, fast, and secure cloud storage. In just over a year, Wasabi has acquired more than 3,000 customers across a wide range of industries.

"The Series B financing will allow Wasabi to expand internationally, continue to invest in our brand, and enable us to compete for the largest storage deals in the world. Our objective is to make Wasabi into one of the world's most renowned cloud storage vendors," explains David Friend, Co-founder & CEO of Wasabi. "Everyone needs to store data and storage is fundamental to everything that is going on with media and entertainment, surveillance, genomics, scientific research, social media, and IoT. We are cloud storage experts – our team has been doing it since 2005 when we founded Carbonite. Our investors recognize that Wasabi is a technical tour de force that gives us a sustainable advantage in a market that is doubling every two years. Fueled 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. The round includes our first foreign investor, Forestay Capital, the tech fund of Swiss entrepreneur, Ernesto Bertarelli. The round also includes the investment arms of other family offices."

"We have a constant appetite for recognizing major market trends, and there's no doubt that data is moving to the cloud. Wasabi's groundbreaking technology and first-rate management team provide a great way to invest in the future of storage," said Frederic Wohlwend, Managing Partner of Forestay Capital. "Through our group's deep background in healthcare, we have seen the huge growth of data storage requirements first hand, including for medical images, genomic research and more. Wasabi has a compelling advantage and opportunity to become a global game changer and its base on the East Coast is also in line with our goal to invest capital in that region's tech sector."

The market and demand for affordable data storage is accelerating and driving innovation. Analysts estimate that only 20% of enterprises have moved some of their data to the cloud. Adoption is increasing as customers realize that the cost of Wasabi cloud storage is far less than the cost of on-premises storage. Many of Wasabi's early customers are enterprises who are first-time cloud adopters deploying public, hybrid or multi-cloud architectures. The company's largest customers are in Media and Entertainment, Healthcare/Genomics research, Video Surveillance and Education – industries with massive file storage and rapid data retrieval requirements.

Customer adoption has been rapid; Wasabi maintains a consistent growth rate of 5-10% per week with billions of objects currently stored. Growing global demand has resulted in nearly 20% of the company's business coming from the EU. Wasabi will open its first European data center later this year. Their second data center, located near Portland, OR, is already supporting customers from Asia. Market demand is driving innovation from Wasabi; in the past six months alone, the company introduced the industry's first cloud storage offering with unlimited free egress, introduced Wasabi Direct Connect, a high-speed, dedicated private connection directly to Wasabi, and they have benchmarked an ecosystem of over 100 partners currently integrating their solutions through Wasabi's open API.

According to analyst Sushrutha Sadashiva at Frost & Sullivan, a leading global market research and consultancy focused on innovation opportunities driven by disruptive technologies, mega trends, emerging markets and new business models, "Wasabi's product design strategy that revolves around building its performance- and security-oriented cloud storage architecture with a competitive pricing model has set a benchmark among its peers, thereby disrupting the cloud storage framework that has been dominated by large companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Their foresight in recognizing 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 near future while meeting the needs of a wide range of customers."

About Wasabi:

Wasabi is the hot cloud storage company delivering low-cost, fast, and reliable cloud storage. Wasabi is 80% cheaper and 6x faster than Amazon S3, with 100% data immutability protection and no data egress fees. Created by Carbonite co-founders and cloud storage pioneers David Friend and Jeff Flowers, Wasabi is on a mission to commoditize the storage industry. Wasabi is a privately held company based in Boston, MA. Follow and connect with Wasabi on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and our blog.

About Forestay Capital:

Founded in 2017, Forestay invests in the tech sector and is focused on earlier stage novel, revenue-generating technology companies, in Europe, the USA and Israel, that challenge established models and the status-quo, primarily through software and data. It is part of Waypoint Capital, chaired by Ernesto Bertarelli, which supports a broad portfolio of leading investment businesses. (www.forestaycapital.com)