the bucket

Securing Funding In Unprecedented Times

Securing Funding In Unprecedented Times

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

June 2, 2020

Over the last few months, as global markets entered a freefall, I was tasked with raising a new round of funding for Wasabi. This is far from the ideal environment for a startup in search of capital. And yet, in one of the worst investment markets since The Great Depression, I am pleased to announce that Wasabi has secured $30 million in new investment that will fuel our global expansion. And it was accomplished at a significant uptick in valuation.

How did we manage to accomplish this, even with circumstances conspiring against us? The way I see it, storage is a “must have.” The demand for storage, and cloud storage in particular, is exploding. Everything is generating more data: surveillance, genomics, media and entertainment, medical imaging, “big science,” law enforcement and national security, and IoT are churning out data at an unprecedented rate. Companies have begun to see the need for an infinitely scalable data repository and are turning to the cloud to attain one.

Wasabi’s 100% dedication to providing storage that is always the lowest price and highest performance has made us indispensable to our customers. Wasabi delivers a product that people depend on, and our sales figures support this. The company continues to grow revenues at 40% quarter-to-quarter. And our investors recognize that our growth opportunity is, for all practical purposes, infinite. Even amid a global market turndown, our growth appears to be unaffected.

As the world creates more data, Wasabi plans to be the place where it is stored. With 5G looming, the stage is set for a global surge in data generation—and I do mean global! The funding we have just raised will be used primarily to expand Wasabi’s infrastructure and capacity to meet growing global demand for storage in the $90 billion public cloud storage market. Wasabi plans to create our first foothold in Canada and extend our hot cloud storage service in Europe, APAC, and Latin America.

Wasabi has a long road ahead. Our competition includes some of the largest, most profitable corporations in the world. But the future looks bright! People are recognizing the value of data and are increasingly reluctant to delete it. So there is some urgency to find a storage vendor that has great economics, fast performance, reliability, and an established track record. Nearly every business is growing increasingly dependent on its proprietary data for competitive advantage. This is true in logistics, drug discovery, retail, banking, natural resources, and even politics.

We have a simple mission: to be the world’s best cloud storage vendor. Period. If we stick to our knitting and focus on this one goal, our investors will be well rewarded.

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