Cloud data storage company Wasabi announced today that it has raised $ 112 million in Series C funding, bringing its total to $ 219 million. The company says the funding will be spent on expanding its network of resellers, partners and distributors as it opens new data centers, expands its team and builds its brand through new marketing initiatives.

With data storage in the cloud growing by 60% year on yearInexpensive, reliable, and scalable storage services are demanded by many organizations. In 2020, around 50% of all corporate data was stored in the cloud, according to at Statista. And a 2018 report by Domo estimated that humans were creating 2.5 quintillion bytes (or 2.5 exabytes) of data per day, a number that has only grown since.

Launched by Carbonite co-founders David Friend and Jeff Flowers in 2017, Boston-based Wasabi offers what he calls “hot cloud storage,” a cloud object storage technology that provides an interface for use with applications. storage, gateways and other platforms. The company says its offering is faster than traditional frequent access storage products while still treating all data equally and making it easily accessible.

Wasabi supports three types of data: hot data, active “cool data” archives, and inactive cool data archives. Hot data is data that must be easily accessible to the operating system or the application with which it was created. Active archived data is considered too valuable to delete, but is only viewed occasionally. And inactive archived data is considered essential to back up, but rarely recovered, typically for regulatory and compliance reasons.

Wasabi, which does not charge fees for egress or API requests (that is, when data leaves the network in transit), says its storage services are one-fifth of the cost of Simple Cloud Storage. (S3) on Amazon Web Services (AWS). But as developer Robert Hook notes in a blog post, it is difficult to make a direct cost comparison because the pricing structure for Wasabi and AWS differs. AWS offers a range of options for different use cases and access models, charging a fee for moving objects in and out of storage. Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go pricing model is simpler, but customers who store items are charged the full amount even if they delete them. Each object has a 90-day retention period, so when an object is deleted, it is moved to a deleted object store and remains recoverable for three months. Wasabi customers are billed the same for the deleted store as they are for their active store.

“[For example], if you remove the 100TB of storage in less than 23 days, Wasabi will cost more than AWS S3, ”Wasabi explains on its website. “However, if you store the 100TB of data for more than 23 days, Wasabi will cost less than AWS S3… In summary, if you have data that you only need to keep for short periods of time before deletion, it may be more profitable for you to keep this data in AWS. “

Attractive prices

Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go pricing model is $ 5.99 per TB per month. The company also offers a reserved capacity storage pricing model with a 30-day storage retention policy that allows customers to purchase capacity of 50TB or more for terms of one, three, or five years.

The structure obviously appeals to some companies, as Wasabi says it has more than 15,000 companies storing “hundreds of petabytes” of backup, surveillance, medical imaging, life science, education, genomics, AI and machine learning, television, film and government on its servers. Revenue increased fivefold in 2019 and Q1 growth that year was over 40% compared to Q1 2018.

The real trick for Wasabi will be to maintain its competitiveness in a cloud storage market. projected to reach a value of $ 137.3 billion by 2025. Beyond AWS, Wasabi counts Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure among its competitors, as well as Cohesity, Datrium, Reduxio and others. A rival, Rubrik, which offers cloud data and storage management, has raised more than $ 292 million since its launch in 2014.

“With revenue tripling for each of the past 3 years and over $ 100 million in new investments from one of the world’s largest and most prestigious financial institutions, our clients will know their data is between the hands of a reliable and rapidly growing company. with the substantial resources to meet their growing needs, ”Friend said in a press release. “Storing global data in the cloud is one of the greatest opportunities in the IT industry, and we are now well positioned to take a leadership role in the evolution of the cloud.”

Fidelity Management & Research Company today announced Wasabi’s Series C, which had participation from existing investors. It follows the $ 27.5 million debt financing announced in January.