Cloud storage unicorn Wasabi says it now has 15,000 partners worldwide, as it continues to grow its “hot” data business, which allows organisations to get the operational data they need quickly, after storing it in the global Wasabi cloud.
The company became a unicorn after its last funding round in 2022, which gave it a $1.1 billion valuation.
At this week’s IT Press Tour of Boston and Massachusetts, which IT Europa is attending, Wasabi CEO David Friend said the company was growing 60-70% every year in terms of sales, and is believed to have reached the $135m-turnover mark last year. As a private company, Wasabi doesn’t publicly reveal a full balance sheet.
The company’s previous public customer figure was 90,000, but we learned on the Tour the number had hit the magic 100k, which is quite impressive for a company that only got going in 2017. Customers range from very small firms only spending about $100 a month, to big media companies like the BBC and ITV.
Wasabi only employs about 400 people worldwide, so to support that number of customers on every continent, it needs an extensive channel footprint, which it continues to build. “The growth in Europe is actually the fastest, and we have recently signed key partners like Bechtle in Germany, and Retelit in Italy,” said Friend.
Retelit, a data centre services firm, running an extensive data centre footprint across Italy and abroad, began providing its own similar hot cloud storage service a few years ago, but the success of Wasabi in the market, has led it to host and offer Wasabi’s product from its own data centres.
After it started, Wasabi’s first data centre offering the service was in Amsterdam, which was then followed by Paris and London. It now plans to open a second data centre in London “in partnership with IBM”, said Friend.
“Channel partners like us as we’re a simple product to sell, the list price is $6.99 per terabyte of data to store every month, and that’s it,” Friend said. There are no charges for moving data in and out of the Wasabi cloud, unlike the extra charges AWS - and the other big hyperscale cloud providers - levy on their customers as part of sometimes complicated monthly bills.
With it generating so much channel business, from data centre service providers to managed service providers and VARS, Wasabi is definitely a company to continue to watch.
