Storage Firm Wasabi Closes New $70M Funding, Prepares For AI Future: ‘The Market Opportunity Is Just So Big’

‘We’re a very fast-growing company. We’re today focused much more on growth than profitability. There is a point in time where we’ll want to demonstrate profitability. Right now, it’s all about expansion. The space is just so large, and we’re seeing expansion, not only with our existing direct customers, the ones we deal with that buy directly from us, but also those who buy through our expansive network of channel partners,’ says Michael Bayer, Wasabi’s executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Wasabi, the self-proclaimed “hot storage company,” Tuesday said it has closed a new funding round to the tune of $70 million. It’s the latest in several rounds of funding in the company, but this round is unique in that one of the investors is flash storage technology developer Pure Storage.

Michael Bayer, executive vice president and chief financial officer of the Boston-based company, told CRN that Pure Storage is a long-time technology partner, but he declined to talk about what that company’s investment might mean in terms of expanded technology or marketing partnerships.

“Bringing in Pure helps us with the footprint around our Wasabi Fire offering that we’ll be expanding as time goes on,” Bayer said.

[Related: The 20 Coolest Cloud Storage Companies Of The 2026 Cloud 100]

Wasabi, which has raised $600 million and is now valued at $1.8 billion, is one of the top “unicorns” of the storage industry and is very much in growth mode, Bayer (pictured above) said.

“We’re a very fast-growing company,” he said. “We’re today focused much more on growth than profitability. There is a point in time where we’ll want to demonstrate profitability. Right now, it’s all about expansion. The space is just so large, and we’re seeing expansion, not only with our existing direct customers, the ones we deal with that buy directly from us, but also those who buy through our expansive network of channel partners.”

Looking ahead, AI continues to be a major play for Wasabi, Bayer said.

“[AI is] certainly an important theme, and we’re leaning into the rapidly expanding need for more storage,” he said. “AI consumes storage like we consume lunch. It’s a necessary part of that. And we feel very well positioned to serve that world because we have a great storage product. While all the dialog is around GPUs and compute, I think there’s oftentimes not enough of a focus on that it all starts with data.”

There’s a lot going on at Wasabi. To learn more, read CRN’s full conversation with Bayer, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

Talk about Wasabi’s new investment round.

This was mostly an inside investor-led round. We raised $70 million of fresh capital almost exclusively from existing investors. The round was led by the lead investor from our D round, which is L2 Point Management. A lot of existing investors participated, including Fidelity Management & Research. We also had an exciting new investor in this round, which is Pure Storage. It’s a partner for us in the solid state or flash storage industry. We’re really excited to put all that together. It’s a great funding event for us. It helps support our evolution and expansion specifically targeting the AI workspace. That’s not the only thing that we do, but it’s an emerging need. Bringing in Pure helps us with the footprint around our Wasabi Fire offering that we’ll be expanding as time goes on.

Why the need for the funding? Wasabi has been around for quite a while.

I wouldn’t suggest that Wasabi is a profitable company. We’re a very fast-growing company. We’re today focused much more on growth than profitability. There is a point in time where we’ll want to demonstrate profitability. Right now, it’s all about expansion. The space is just so large, and we’re seeing expansion, not only with our existing direct customers, the ones we deal with that buy directly from us, but also those who buy through our expansive network of channel partners. And so we’re all about growth, growth, growth, and investing in continuing to be one of the fastest growing companies in the IT industry. And the funding is essentially to help us continue to expand. The market opportunity is just so big that we see lots of places where we can continue to invest in the existing business, the traditional cloud object storage business, which is exciting. We’ve got 100,000-plus customers in that space. But we also see emerging AI loads out there. There are some applications that we find very interesting. We have some early customers that are doing that. And then as you think about the marketplace, it’s my belief that today while we talk about AI customers, tomorrow every customer is going to be an AI customer. They’re all going to have similar kinds of needs for high-performance, low-cost storage, as well as the traditional good performance storage that we’ve been delivering for years and years.

With this new funding round of $70 million, what’s the total funding in Wasabi?

Just over $600 million, between the equity rounds we raised and some debt support that we have.

Do you publish the total valuation of Wasabi based upon the investments?

We touch on it. This was done at a $1.8-billion valuation, which makes us quite happy. It’s a pretty significant step up from the last time we raised capital. It’s a recognition of how much we have grown and continue to grow.

Pure Storage is involved in the round. Is this the first investment from a storage vendor in Wasabi?

I can’t speak to all of our investors. We didn’t announce anything. I’m trying to remember exactly which round it was. We did have an investment from Western Digital in a prior round a ways back. And we have a number of other investors. I just can’t speak to details. But Western Digital was in there. And now we have Pure. We’ve got two very different categories of storage vendors, which give us exposure to a broader world. That’s not to say that we don’t have partnerships outside of those that have invested in us. We’ve got extensive partnerships with IBM and Dell that we’ve spoken to in the past, and a whole bunch of other channel partners.

With Pure Storage’s investment in Wasabi, are there any marketing or technology partnership arrangements that go along with that investment?

Yeah, we haven’t announced anything specific at this point. It does certainly bring us closer and emphasizes and strengthens a partnership that exists.

You said “a partnership that exists.” What is Pure Storage doing with Wasabi?

We haven’t announced anything. We’re very fond of Pure. They’re innovators in this space. Again, we’re trying to be fairly agnostic around our vendors. So we try to have connections with multiple vendors, because we like to be a very open company and deal and partner with lots of different companies. But we are fond of Pure.

Do you expect to do any more funding rounds going forward?

Nothing I can speak to.

OK, so that’s not a yes, not a no.

That’s not a yes, that’s not a no.

Fair enough. What are some of Wasabi’s strategic priorities for 2026?

It’s all about growth, growth, growth. We look to expand our global footprint. We’ve got 16 data centers, and we’re always thinking about where else we can get 16 data centers around the globe. Look at AI. What more can I say? It’s certainly an important theme, and we’re leaning into the rapidly expanding need for more storage. AI consumes storage like we consume lunch. It’s a necessary part of that. And we feel very well positioned to serve that world because we have a great storage product. While all the dialog is around GPUs and compute, I think there’s oftentimes not enough of a focus on that it all starts with data. That data has got to be stored someplace, and then you can do all your fancy AI stuff on it. So it will be a continuing focus of our core value proposition, which is lower cost, high performance storage, and positioning that increasingly into AI-specific applications. Now it sounds like it’s all about AI, but it’s not. It’s not like all the stuff that we’ve been doing up until now as an IT industry is just going away. There are going to be lots of new applications that are AI-driven or AI-friendly, but there are still plenty of ongoing operations and applications that exist yesterday and are going to exist tomorrow. And so we believe we’ve got a great platform to support companies that are doing what they’re doing today. They are exploring this AI world, but they want to have their data accessible to the conventional apps they’ve been using for a long time as well as to the new things that are coming along. We’ve moved from digitization to automation, and now AI enables autonomy, and we want to be able to serve all of those needs with the same core value proposition of high performance and lower cost storage that doesn’t lock you into one particular environment.

What has Wasabi done technology-wise specific to working with AI?

Our Wasabi Fire offering is a higher performance class of storage that delivers faster storage for AI specific loads. We have Wasabi AiR, our AI-powered metadata tagging capability. We’re still thinking about cyber resilience, which is AI adjacent. Why is that? Well, there are more threats out there with AI, and so it’s not just about serving up LLM applications or inference engines. If hackers are better, that means cyber resilience is more important. So we rolled out Covert Copy, which is a new product focused on the expanding needs for cyber resilience in an AI-driven world. These are all sorts of different things that we do, outside of the core S3 offering that we have. They’re sort of add-ons that demonstrate our innovation in the marketplace.

Given the performance requirements of AI, is Wasabi Fire based on SSD flash storage technology?

Yeah, that’s an NVMe storage class.

Who are you partnering with on flash storage?

We haven’t been specific about that.

I suppose if I asked if that’s Pure Storage, you wouldn’t answer?

We haven’t been specific about that yet.