MinIO raises $103 mn in Series B funding round, joins the Unicorn list

MinIO Inc, creators of the MinIO multi-cloud object storage suite, announced today that it has raised $103 million in Series B funding at a $1 billion valuation. The investment was led by Intel Capital with participation from new investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, and existing investors Dell Capital, General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners.

Today’s financing brings MinIO’s total funding raised to $126 million. The company becomes the fourth unicorn of the year. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto MinIO and has a subsidiary in Bengaluru and is rapidly expanding their engineering footprint in that geography. MinIO has dozens of customers across India, Asia and the Middle East.

MinIO is an object storage provider for multi-cloud users. It has established itself as the leader in AWS S3 compatible, multi-cloud object storage. Available on every cloud, MinIO has more than 1.2 million active deployments on the public cloud, private cloud and edge. This includes 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.

“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 announcing the deal.

He added: “Our frictionless open source approach has delivered developer mindshare. We see that in the data - 10,000+ enterprises running MinIO in the last 30 days. A Slack channel with more than 16K members. Massive enterprise adoption.”

“MinIO’s ability to solve the multi-cloud storage challenges faced by developers is impressive and we are delighted to continue supporting their mission through investment from Intel Capital,” said Greg Lavender, Chief Technology Officer; Senior Vice President, General Manager, Software and Advanced Technology Group for Intel Corporation.

MinIO continues to extend its feature leadership with the addition of click to deploy capabilities on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

"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/ML, advanced analytics, databases and modern applications,” said Vikas Parekh, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers.

MinIO growth metric include an ARR growth of over 201 per cent, the customer count grew by over 208 per cent in 2021 alone, said the company.

“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 COO and Co-founder Garima Kapoor noted, “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.”