the bucket

Celebrating Our Global Expansion

Celebrating Our Global Expansion

David Friend
By David Friend
President, CEO & Co-founder

March 5, 2019

With the opening of our first European data center in Amsterdam, it seems like a good time to provide an update on Wasabi. First, I want to give a shout out to Richard Czech who represents Wasabi in Europe. He's off to a strong start with lots of data already flowing into our new Amsterdam data center. And thanks to our amazing compliance team for getting our GDPR compliance ready in record time.

It's hard to believe that the company is still less than 2 years old—we launched in May 2017 after a couple of years in stealth mode. Our very first customer, the Kim Komando Show, kindly paid for their first month's subscription in cash so that we could frame the first dollar bill (signed by Kim) and put it on our trophy wall. It took us about 5 months to sell our first petabyte of storage.

Fast forward a year (and I do mean fast!) and nowadays we sell a petabyte of storage every couple of days, we have over 100 PBs online already, more than 6,000 paying customers, and over 4,000 more in trial. We have been growing roughly 20% month-over-month. There are over 70 Wasabians in the office compared with about a dozen a year ago.

When we started out, we had a vision of cloud storage as a simple, cheap, fast, and super-reliable commodity, like electricity or Internet connectivity. We wanted Wasabi to become to bits and bytes what Iron Mountain is to physical storage—the brand that is everyone's obvious choice for digital storage. With our second anniversary approaching, I'd say we're well on our way to achieving that vision.

Cloud storage is already a huge market, but it's really still in its infancy. The vast majority of all the world's data is still in on-premises storage. As people discover that they can store a petabyte of data in Wasabi for less than just the annual maintenance on a petabyte of on-premises storage, the migration to the cloud accelerates. So, we're not going to get distracted by any of the shiny new objects that other IaaS companies are pursuing—we are just sticking to our knitting, pursuing our ambition of being the best cloud storage in the world.

If you've been waiting for this moment (like we have) then we're pleased to welcome you!

the bucket
David Friend
By David Friend
President, CEO & Co-founder