MinIO Inc, creators of the MinIO multi-cloud object storage suite, has raised $103 million as a part of its Series B funding round led by existing investor Intel Capital at a valuation of $1 billion, the company said in a statement on January 27, 2022, making it another unicorn of the year.
The statement released by the company said that new investors, Japan’s SoftBank Group, through its SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and existing investors Dell Capital, General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners, participated in the funding round. The financing brings MinIO’s total funding raised to $126 million.
Prior to this funding round, MinIO raised $20 million in a Series A investment round led by Nexus Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital and General Catalyst Partners in September 2017.
The company, headquartered in Palo Alto, also has a subsidiary in India’s IT city Bengaluru and is rapidly expanding its engineering footprint in that geography. MinIO has dozens of customers across India, Asia and the Middle East.
More than 1.2 million active deployments of the public cloud
It is an object storage provider for multi-cloud users. It has established itself as the AWS S3 compatible, multi-cloud object storage leader. Available on every cloud, MinIO has more than 1.2 million active deployments on the public cloud, private cloud and edge.
“With Indian organizations becoming cloud-first, it represents an important market for MinIO to focus on and invest in as we enter into the company’s next phase of growth and expansion,” said Garima Kapoor, Co-Founder and COO, MinIO.
The startup is a high-performance, Kubernetes-native, S3 compatible object store for a range of data storage use cases. The company said its performance exceeds comparable object stores and delivers tens of gigabytes of data per node in throughput. The company claims to have established itself as a leader in AWS S3 compatible, multi-cloud storage.
“With our $103M Series B, MinIO’s valuation tops $1B and represents a concrete, meaningful validation of our strategy to build the world’s leading object-store. We have achieved this with a remarkable group of around forty people. It is a textbook example of how a small, disciplined, motivated and talented team can achieve amazing results,” wrote Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder in his blog.
MinIO growth metrics include an ARR growth of over 201 percent
MinIO, founded in 2014 by Anand Babu Periasamy, Garima Kapoor, Harshavardhana and Frederick Kautz, claims to have registered a 201 percent growth in its annual recurring revenue (ARR) last year. It added that its customer count grew by over 208 percent in 2021 alone.
“High performance, multi-cloud object storage represents a foundational component in the modern software stack. We believe that MinIO has established itself as the leader for a diverse set of workloads from AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning), advanced analytics, databases and modern applications,” said Vikas Parekh, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.
MinIO extends its feature leadership with click-to-deploy capabilities on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
“Object storage has been the primary storage of the public cloud and, with the adoption of Kubernetes, has become the primary storage for the private cloud and edge as well,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director of Nexus Venture Partners.
