Nexus Venture Partners-backed multi-cloud object storage suite MinIO, operated by MinIO Inc, 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.
New investor, Japan’s SoftBank Group through its SoftBank Vision Fund 2, along with existing investors Dell Capital, General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the funding round, the statement said.
With the latest fundraise, the company has raised $126 million to date. 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.
MinIO has a subsidiary in Bangalore, India and is expanding its engineering footprint in the country, it said. MinIO also said it has dozens of customers across India, Asia and the Middle East.
MinIO is a high performance, Kubernetes-native, S3 compatible object store for a range of data storage use cases. The company claims to have established itself as a leader in AWS S3 compatible, multi-cloud storage. The company said its performance exceeds comparable object stores and delivers tens of gigabytes of data per node in throughput.
"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 claims to have more than 1.2 million active deployments on the public cloud, private cloud and edge, which include public cloud deployments on Google Kubernetes Engine, Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service, Azure Kubernetes Service, private cloud deployments on Red Hat OpenShift, VMware Tanzu, HPE Ezmeral, SUSE Rancher as well as millions of colocation and edge deployments, the company said.
“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.
MinIO, founded in 2014 by Anand Babu Periasamy, Garima Kapoor, Harshavardhana and Frederick Kautz, claims to have registered a 201% growth in its annual recurring revenue (ARR) last year. It added that its customer count grew by over 208% in 2021 alone.
“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.