object-storage
(22)
Lucidity wants to stop billing you for empty space
Oversized cloud disks are insurance against a very bad evening. Lucidity’s wager is that software can provide the safety without charging rent on all that empty space.
Backblaze built a cloud to keep a $5 promise
A cheap backup service needed cheaper hardware. Backblaze built its own, published the design, and found that the same economics could serve everyone from music archivists to AI clouds.
Quantum and the virtue of forgetting nothing
A rocket launch, a human genome, a film nobody has finished editing. Quantum makes a business of keeping bulky, irreplaceable data useful - without giving every byte the expensive seat.
The observability bill that made less data look like a feature
OpenObserve wants engineers to keep the logs, metrics and traces they need without treating every new byte as a financial emergency. Its wager is a Rust engine, compressed Parquet files and object storage - plus a business built around making that machinery usable.
The Database Company That Learned to Love the Bucket
Tigris started by promising developers an entire data platform. Then it chose one unfashionable primitive - the object-storage bucket - and discovered that AI had made boring infrastructure interesting again.
Jon Toor Has Spent Four Decades Making Storage Sound Urgent
Before AI needed data lakes, Jon Toor was already translating hard drives, virtualized I/O and object storage into reasons to care. His career is a lesson in staying with one difficult industry long enough to watch its quiet machinery become the main event.
Paul Speciale Knows the Cloud Still Has a Basement
Before AI could answer a question, Paul Speciale spent decades thinking about where its data would live. His route from C++ developer to Scality's chief marketing officer is a lesson in making invisible infrastructure legible.
Mitch Seigle Is Making the Case for Tape in an AI-Hungry World
After four decades marketing storage, Mitch Seigle has found his sharpest argument in an old medium: when data becomes permanent, the future may depend on knowing what can safely go offline.
Scality Bet Against the Storage Tax - Now AI Is Making the Bet Look Timely
For 17 years, Scality has sold a stubborn idea: the valuable part of storage should be software, while the hardware underneath stays replaceable. Ransomware, sovereignty rules and GPU-hungry AI have made that once-technical argument a boardroom concern.
The 47-Year-Old Bet That Tape Would Outlive the Cloud
Spectra Logic built a durable business around an unfashionable truth: most data does not need to be instantly online, but some of it must survive for decades. Its answer combines robotic tape libraries, object interfaces and archive software - with economics that become persuasive at petabyte scale.
Cloudian Survived a Telco Crash. Now It Wants to Feed AI Without Shipping Your Data Away
Cloudian turned the wreckage of a mobile-messaging company into an enterprise storage business. Its newest wager is that the AI race will be won as much in the data room as in the GPU rack.
DataCore’s 28-Year Bet: Your Storage Hardware Isn’t the Product - Control Is
DataCore built a business by telling IT teams to keep the expensive storage they already own. Now, after acquisitions and a Kubernetes push, it is trying to make the same anti-lock-in argument from the data center to the edge.
Garima Kapoor Bet the Cloud Would Come Back to the Data
She trained to read balance sheets, then helped build the storage layer for machines that never stop reading. MinIO's co-founder explains why focus, open standards, and staying close to the data still matter in the AI era.
StorONE
StorONE is a New York-based enterprise storage software company founded in 2011 by Gal Naor and Raz Gordon. Its ONE Storage Platform separates storage services from hardware, delivering block, file and object storage from a single, hardware-agnostic engine. By rewriting the storage stack from scratch, StorONE combines high performance, real-time auto-tiering across flash and HDD, immutable-snapshot ransomware recovery and per-drive licensing to help enterprises cut storage costs while running on commodity servers.
Greptime
Greptime is an open-source database company building GreptimeDB, a unified observability database that stores metrics, logs, traces, and wide events in a single engine on object storage like Amazon S3. Written in Rust and built on Apache Arrow and DataFusion, it separates compute from storage to cut costs at scale and speaks both SQL and PromQL. Founded in 2022 by ex-Alibaba and Ant Group engineers, Greptime positions GreptimeDB as a drop-in replacement for the Prometheus, Loki, and Elasticsearch stack, serving customers across connected vehicles, IoT, and observability.
Quobyte
Quobyte is a software company that turns commodity x86 or ARM servers into a unified, high-performance, software-defined storage system spanning file, block, and object interfaces. Founded in 2013 by two ex-Google engineers who previously built the open-source XtreemFS parallel file system, Quobyte applies hyperscaler design principles - resilient software rather than exotic hardware - to enterprise, HPC, and AI storage. Its Data Center File System combines NVMe and HDD tiers in one architecture and is used by organizations including Siemens Healthineers, robotaxi maker Zoox, the UK's STFC/JASMIN supercomputer, and Yahoo Japan.
StoneFly, Inc.
StoneFly, Inc. is a Castro Valley, California enterprise storage company founded in 1996 that helped turn iSCSI into an industry standard - it registered iSCSI.com in March 1996 and shipped one of the first iSCSI storage appliances in 2002. Today it builds NAS, SAN, unified scale-out (USO), backup and disaster-recovery appliances, and cloud storage, all powered by its patented StoneFusion operating system and Air-Gapped Vault immutable, ransomware-resistant technology. A subsidiary of Dynamic Network Factory (DNF), StoneFly serves 10,000+ customers from SMBs to Fortune 500 and government - including deployments aboard US Navy Littoral Combat Ships and Virginia-class submarines.
Spiral
Spiral is a New York-based data infrastructure company building a database reimagined from the ground up for the AI era - what it calls the 'Third Age of Data,' when machines, not humans, are the primary consumers of data. Built on Vortex, an open-source columnar file format donated to the Linux Foundation, Spiral streams data directly from object storage into GPU memory, unifies governance across every data type from tiny embeddings to massive video, and aims to keep expensive GPUs saturated instead of idle. Founded by ex-Palantir and ex-Citadel engineers, it emerged from stealth in September 2025 with $22M in Seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst and Amplify Partners.
Will Manning
Will Manning is the co-founder and CEO of Spiral, a New York data company building infrastructure for the moment machines became the main consumers of data. He spent nearly a decade at Palantir co-creating and scaling Foundry, then set out to fix a bottleneck nobody else seemed bothered by: GPUs that can swallow terabits per second, fed through legacy file formats that make CPUs decompress everything first. His answer is Vortex, an open columnar format he donated to the Linux Foundation, and Spiral, the exabyte-scale system built on top of it. Spiral launched from stealth in September 2025 with $22M from Amplify Partners and General Catalyst.
LucidLink
LucidLink is a San Francisco-based company that makes cloud storage feel like a local hard drive. Its Filespaces platform streams file data on demand from cloud object storage, letting creative teams and enterprises around the world collaborate on huge files - video, design, datasets - without syncing or downloading. Customers include Paramount, Spotify, Adobe, A&E Networks, BuzzFeed and Shopify.
MinIO
MinIO is a high-performance, S3-compatible object storage company building the data layer for AI. Its software-defined storage runs on commodity hardware in private clouds, on-prem, and at the edge, and is used by more than half of the Fortune 500 to power analytics, ML training, and exascale AI workloads.
Anand Periasamy
Anand Babu 'AB' Periasamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of MinIO, the world's most widely deployed open-source object storage platform with over 2 million Docker pulls per day. A serial entrepreneur from Tamil Nadu, India, he previously co-founded Gluster Inc. — the distributed file system company acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011. With MinIO, he built a Kubernetes-native, Amazon S3-compatible storage engine that became foundational infrastructure for AI, machine learning, and data-lake workloads. In January 2022, MinIO closed a $103M Series B at a $1 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status with backing from Intel Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners.