Nasuni CEO On Expanding Cloud-Native Unstructured Data Platform For AI

‘What we see in this moment in time is an evolution from the pioneering work we did around hybrid cloud storage to now having that data foundation built for our customers and providing data access to AI solutions that they are increasingly adopting in a permission-aware, governed, secure way,’ says Nasuni CEO Sam King.

In the 17 years since Nasuni was founded, the company has become a major player in cloud-native global file systems. But Sam King, who 12 months ago took over as CEO of the Boston-based company, wants to make it clear that Nasuni is also a major power in managing data for AI use.

King, in an exclusive interview with CRN, emphasized Nasuni's longstanding commitment to supporting critical enterprise file data.

“For over a decade, we’ve been building the infrastructure that enterprises trust with the most critical file data,” she said. “I’m talking about engineering drawings that a construction firm might be relying on for putting up a really big skyscraper. I’m talking about research files that a health-care company might be using, etc. This is the operational data that their businesses run on. I’m not talking about cold storage. This is life where work is happening every single day.”

[Related: Nasuni Channel Chief: ‘We Are Critical In Making An AI Strategy Easy’]

Nasuni’s unstructured data platform naturally supports enterprise AI initiatives, King said. However, the company this week expanded that AI focus with a couple of new technologies, including AI Activate, which ensures that AI applications have access to customers’ underlying data foundation through an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, and Active Everywhere, which ensures AI applications from the core to the edge get access to the needed data with the same performance and governance characteristics.

With up to 80 percent of data being unstructured, AI needs the kind of capabilities Nasuni brings to managing that data to ensure it has access that is permission-aware, secure and scalable, King said. This evolution, she said, is not a departure from Nasuni’s origins, but rather a natural extension of its foundational work supporting hybrid cloud storage and enterprise file collaboration.

There’s a lot going on with AI, data and Nasuni. Here is more of CRN’s conversation with King.

How do you define Nasuni?

We are the unstructured data platform supporting enterprise teams and the AI that they’re working with.

Given that Nasuni is going through somewhat of a rebranding here with a new logo, has that definition changed at all?

That is the definition that we’re going to be adopting as we move forward.

How has that changed since last year?

First, this is actually my one-year anniversary with the company. I’m particularly thrilled to be speaking to you on my anniversary here. So the thing that’s been most interesting for me over the course of the last year is that in many respects, we feel we were built for this moment right from the start. And here’s what I mean by that. For over a decade, we’ve been building the infrastructure that enterprises trust with the most critical file data. I’m talking about engineering drawings that a construction firm might be relying on for putting up a really big skyscraper. I’m talking about research files that a health-care company might be using, etc. This is the operational data that their businesses run on. I’m not talking about cold storage. This is life where work is happening every single day. People are creating new assets. They’re revising the assets.

What is happening at this moment in time is that the world is asking more of that data because of AI. AI without data can’t do anything particularly useful. AI needs data, and most of an enterprise’s data, in fact, 70 [percent] to 80 percent of an enterprise’s data, is that operational, unstructured data that I was referring to. And so we built Nasuni over the years to create that data foundation lift. And as it turns out, there are many properties associated with our core architecture that are completely relevant for the current moment in time where AI needs access to that governed data foundation. So what we see in this moment in time is an evolution from the pioneering work we did around hybrid cloud storage to now having that data foundation built for our customers and providing data access to AI solutions that they are increasingly adopting in a permission-aware, governed, secure way. That’s the transition that we’ve seen over the course of the last year. But it’s really based on decades of work that the company’s been doing.

Given the emphasis that you’ve placed on AI, including in the original definition in Nasuni, does that still leave room for non-AI workloads?

Absolutely. I really do not believe that we’re chasing an AI trend. We built what I described to you, this underlying file data foundation with immutability, with durability, with scalability, the ‘bilities,’ which is the term that our Chief Product Officer Nick Burling often uses to describe what we’re talking about here. We built this for people. We built this for large enterprises and teams inside those large enterprises to be able to collaborate in a secure, governed, permission-aware way. It turns out that AI solutions need the same data foundations. So when you ask me whether Nasuni leaves room for anything other than AI, we’ve already been supporting enterprise teams with their underlying file data and unstructured data. AI now happens to need the same foundation, and so this is really an expansion and extension of what we’ve been doing for a long time.

In that expansion and extension, has Nasuni had to invest specifically in making this technology applicable to AI data? In other words, have you had to make any changes specifically for AI?

Yes and no. We had a pretty good head start with the core property of our architecture already. Because of the way we have fused the concept of a file infrastructure on top of cloud object storage, which gives you all of those abilities that I was describing earlier, we already had a pretty good head start. So we carry forward the permissioning and the governance and the security posture you have provided to that unstructured data all the way through to making that data available to an AI solution already. So that was always part of our core architecture that now extends itself to AI. We're launching a product called AI Activate, where we are giving AI solutions access to this underlying data foundation that we have through an MCP server. On the other side of this, enterprises can connect it to whatever AI solution they’re using, whatever agentic solutions they’re using, and through AI Activate, they get access to all of that data, and so they’re able to unlock the intelligence from this data. One of the things that I heard over and over as I talked to lots of customers over the course of the last year is, ‘Listen, we love what Nasuni is doing for us in terms of helping us getting our arms around the unstructured data that we have in our organization. Can you help us unlock the insight from this unstructured data with AI?’ That’s what AI Activate is doing. So we had a great head start with our core architecture, and now we’re adding AI Activate to it to allow this unlocking.

How does AI Activate work?

AI Activate plugs into an MCP server on the one hand with direct access to the underlying file architecture that Nasuni is running on behalf of customers. The difference with us is that the intelligence around that file infrastructure lives on Nasuni. Nasuni becomes the underlying file platform that we have. So that means every permission, every governance policy, every version, we track it. We have information on that. So when AI Activate connects into the underlying Nasuni platform, it inherits all of that. And the foundation of AI Activate is a full index of the customer’s data. What a lot of people are trying to do as they implement solutions to unlock insight from their data is copying it somewhere else. You lose the ability to then know what the permissions that your team gave the data are. Or they’re just giving direct access to the data where it’s not indexed. Garbage in, garbage out, right? AI Activate is essentially indexing that data. We have all that intelligence and give AI access to it. And context is king in AI, right? This indexing helps customers narrow that context down because we have all the information about who’s done what files, and when did it happen.

What else is new from Nasuni this week?

We are also introducing Active Everywhere, from our acquisition of Resilio about four weeks ago, so very recent. With Active Everywhere, we want to provide very high-performance access to the end user at the edge. And that is exactly what Resilio gives us the ability to do. It brings land-speed file access all the way to the edge for end users. Think about every plant, every office, every remote location [where] a customer wants to activate their data. Resilio can now help us do that in a very, very highly performant fashion while being connected into the global namespace, the permissioning, the security that Nasuni provides in the underlying platform, and all that without needing to deploy new hardware. It’s great performance at the edge without running into the challenges of procuring additional hardware.

Was Active Everywhere a Resilio product originally?

Active Everywhere was developed by Resilio, and we have now integrated it as Active Everywhere, that Resilio product, into the underlying Nasuni file system.

Does Nasuni do a lot of acquisitions?

It is the first acquisition Nasuni did since I became CEO. I believe there have been other acquisitions, but it has been some time since the company did one. I’m glad you brought that up because when I think about our strategy as a company, as I said earlier, we find ourselves at a really great moment in time where we feel like what we have been honing our craft on for over a decade suddenly has newfound applicability in this world of AI, where everyone is trying to connect AI to their data. The AI models are no longer the competitive focus. Instead, it’s your operational intelligence, right? Your data assets. And as we think about how can we help our customers do that, we want to invest both in our organic product capabilities and developing our product portfolio, but also keep an eye on the market, on who is doing other interesting things that allow us to expand our product portfolio in a way that we’re bringing more and more capabilities to our customers. Resilio was an example of this kind of capability, but we’ve also invested in our own R&D efforts. Not too long ago, we opened an innovation center in India, in Hyderabad, where we have a team of engineers that we have hired, and we’re continuing to build out that team. We are expanding our capacity to do more innovative work, both so that we can continue our product road map at a high velocity, but we’re also looking at interesting companies that we can integrate into.

Do you expect to make any more acquisitions in 2026?

I am open to the right business becoming part of Nasuni in the right way.

We’re still fairly early in 2026. What are some of your strategic priorities for the year?

As a business, what we are pursuing is definitely a profitable growth agenda. That is what we’re driving because we believe our market is big enough and growing fast enough, and we have a very unique offering in this market, particularly at this moment in time, with everything that I’ve described around enterprise teams and AI leading this governed data foundation. To support that, our strategic pillars are around innovation because we want to drive outcomes for our customers through the use of our technology. We’re very proud to have a best-in-class customer [Net Promoter Score]. We’re very proud to have very high customer advocacy on our behalf, and we cherish that immensely. One of the things I’ve heard as I’ve spoken to a lot of customers is them raving about the support they get from Team Nasuni. We want to keep doing more of that. And we want to connect into our customers’ business agendas. And I definitely see our customers moving from this place of, ‘We got to do AI. We got to do AI,’ to figure out, ‘How do we do AI? What are the foundational things that we have to have in place to do AI?’ And that’s where we want to do more to help them.

We also continue to grow our team. I told you we opened an India Innovation Center in Hyderabad to accelerate our product road map. With Resilio, we now have a great team of engineers in Poland. So we have a global presence now. We are headquartered here in Boston near the Seaport, and we also have locations in Europe, in London and Cork and now Warsaw, and [that] Indian Innovation Center in Hyderabad. We’re expanding our team and our capacity to do innovative work for our customers. And we do all of this by constantly holding ourselves to a higher bar inside the company so we can do better on behalf of our customers.

Is Nasuni a profitable organization yet?

Yes.

Any plans for an IPO?

I am focused on driving growth the right way. That’s what I focus on. What optionality that provides our business down the road will come down the road. But right now, I’m interested in bringing these capabilities to market, continuing to grow our business profitably, and just doing better and better for our customers in an age where they are tackling a lot of old problems and new problems in a very constrained environment with hardware costs rising and with being asked to do more with AI with the same amount of funding. And I believe if we stay focused on helping our customers do great in that environment, great things will happen for us.

What part of Nasuni’s business comes from indirect channels versus direct channels?

We are a channel-led organization in that almost all our business comes through the channel, so we’re 100 percent channel. One of the things we have invested in is how do we enable our partners to help our customers solve the kinds of problems I described earlier? We recognize that this is the classic people-process-technology coming together, and so there are important pieces of the puzzle that Nasuni provides. But we recognize the role that our partner community has to play in this as well. So we’re very much oriented around how do we build services plus product solutions from Nasuni to bring to customers.

With Nasuni’s new offerings, AI Activate and Active Everywhere, are there any new training or certifications for channel partners?

We will be doing enablement for our partner community for both of those things and additionally for other offerings Nasuni already has.