Cloud storage firm Wasabi has raised a fresh $25 million in a Series C extension, less than a month after closing a $112 million Series C funding round as the Boston, Massachusetts-based company continues to grow at a blistering pace: it has now secured 23,000 customers worldwide and over 5,000 Channel Partners.
This week's Series C extension was led by Prosperity7 Ventures, the diversified growth fund of Aramco Ventures, with Western Digital Capital, the investment arm of storage device manufacturer Western Digital, also participating in the round. Wasabi (which was founded in 2015) has now raised $244 million in equity finance in total as it aims to make the most of rapacious demand for low cost data storage around the world.
The additional capital will be deployed to build out Wasabi’s global data centre footprint - it currently has data centres in Amsterdam, Northern Virginia, Oregon, Texas, and Tokyo -- along with its distribution channels, partner network and capacity across its own team, Wasabi said.
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The company claims cloud storages of 1/5th the cost and faster than hyperscale competition with no fees for egress or API requests and has sold customers on a low cost and highly simplified pricing strategy.
“I am delighted to have these two new strategic investors,” said Wasabi CEO and co-founder, David Friend. “We have been using Western Digital disk drives since the founding of the company.
"Their investment in Wasabi reflects the fact that data storage in the cloud is accelerating and that there is a growing interdependence between our companies. As for Aramco, we see the energy sector as a huge potential market for cloud storage and to have the VC Fund of the world’s largest energy company invest in Wasabi couldn’t be timelier. We are also interested in the Middle East as a potential market in general.”
“Wasabi changes the economics of data storage,” said Aysar Tayeb, Executive Managing Director of Prosperity7 Ventures. “There is undisputed massive growth of data generated from almost everything we do, and this will intensify with more 5G, smart cities, IoT, and many other applications. Bringing a solution to the market that offers a significantly lower-cost storage option, at scale, is a timely necessity. We are excited about the value proposition of Wasabi and are pleased to support its vision to store as much of the world’s data as possible”.
