Key Highlights
- Wasabi Technologies, a Boston-based cloud storage company, said it had increased an additional $250 million in funding, half of which came from private equity and other institutional investors and a half from debt.
- It is said the company now has a more than $1.1 billion valuation.
The new funding represents a big bet on Wasabi, using its large channel and alliance partner base to compete against cloud giants such as Amazon Web Services by promising to provide cloud storage for about one-fifth of the cost of utilizing public cloud providers. But a bet on Wasabi is a safe move given how fast the company has grown and the success the CEO and his co-founder partner Jeff Flowers had with their previous venture, Carbonite, a cloud storage provider, which was acquired in 2019 by OpenText for $1.42 billion.
Serial entrepreneur CEO and Co-founder David Friend measures the success of Wasabi in different ways, including having 13,000 channel partners globally with plans to double that number over the next year and alliance relationships with several top data protection vendors. The latter makes it easy for their channel partners to use Wasabi for backend cloud storage.
With this new round of funding, Friend has found a new way to measure success in being able to raise debt. He told that, finally, people are taking them seriously enough that they can raise debt as well as equity.
Friend said he expects this to be the final round of funding Wasabi gets. And he also said the company did not require the extra funding but could immediately become a profitable company if it had been satisfied with its current situation.
He said the emphasis right now is on top-line growth. As long as they expand into all these new markets and build all these data centers and everything else, that is a cash drain. Wasabi and its investors are trusting in growth.
