INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Chances are you see a story about cloud storage, and you yawn and move on, but Wasabi, a startup from the folks who brought you Carbonite
backup, might make you pause
That because they claim to have found a cheaper, faster way to store data, and apparently investors like what they are seeing, forking over
$68 million for a Series B investment.Yes, that a hefty amount for an early round, but with founders who have multiple successful exits,
investors might have seen a lower risk than you might think
The company didn&t go with your usual Sand Hill Road suspects here, instead opting for an unconventional set of industry veterans and family
offices along with Forestay Capital, Swiss entrepreneur, Ernesto Bertarelli technology fund.Much like Packet, a startup that scored $25
million the other day, they are hoping to take on cloud giants by finding a seam in the market they can exploit
While Packet was looking at customized compute, Wasabi is concentrating squarely on storage, an area they understand well from their
Carbonite days.CEO David Friend reports they are offering a terabyte of storage for just $5 a month, and says they are growing 30-40 percent
month over month, since they launched in May 2017
In fact, he says they already have 3500 customers.They took their time building their own custom storage solution, which he claims is faster
and more efficient than any out there, allowing them to undercut Amazon S3 storage prices
Amazon is charging .023 cents per gigabyte for up to 50 terabytes
That works out to $23 a terabyte, substantially more than Wasabi asking price.It begs the question though, how they can afford to keep
For starters, they use co-location facilities like Digital Realty and Equinix for their storage solution instead of building out their own
Friend says as they scale, they won&t be using their investment capital to add more capacity
Instead, they will be borrowing from banks in an apartment building kind of model, where you build the building, rent out the apartments and
break even after a certain amount of time
He says, Wasabi can continue to grow this way.They are going after fat data targets like media and entertainment and genomics, where they
believe companies looking for the best price possible will bypass the big three — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — to build a more
cost-effective storage solution.The road is littered with failed cloud storage plays, but these folks have an experienced team and plenty of
Time will tell if they can buck the odds and take on the world biggest cloud companies by competing on price and performance, or if they can
continue to keep prices this low as they grow and must add increasing capacity without the benefit of being webscale.
