Cloud-storage company Wasabi announced on January 13, 2026, that it raised $70 million in new equity led by existing investor L2 Point Management. Pure Storage joined the round, alongside existing investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company. Wasabi said the financing valued it at $1.8 billion and would fund AI infrastructure, international expansion and product development.
The round matters less for its headline size than for the strategy it signals: Wasabi is trying to extend its predictable-price object-storage business into higher-performance storage for artificial-intelligence workloads without abandoning backup, archive and media customers.
What Wasabi’s financing includes
| Term | What was disclosed |
|---|---|
| Announcement | January 13, 2026 |
| Financing | $70 million of new equity |
| Lead investor | L2 Point Management, an existing investor and lead in Wasabi’s prior Series D |
| Strategic participant | Pure Storage |
| Other named participant | Fidelity Management & Research Company |
| Valuation | $1.8 billion, according to Wasabi and its CFO |
| Total funding | More than $600 million, including equity and debt support |
Wasabi said it will use the proceeds to expand its AI-infrastructure business, broaden its global footprint and enhance its product portfolio. The financing is equity, not a disclosed credit facility or ordinary debt refinancing.
Wasabi’s reported scale is also significant, although it has not been independently audited in the available disclosures. The company says it serves more than 100,000 customers, manages more than three exabytes of data and operates in 16 global regions. CFO Michael Bayer gave the customer figure in an interview with CRN; the funding announcement supplied the exabyte and region figures.
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Why Pure Storage’s investment is strategically important
Pure Storage is a major flash-storage company and, in Wasabi’s description, a longstanding technology partner. Its participation therefore fits Wasabi’s move toward Wasabi Fire, the company’s NVMe-oriented, high-performance object-storage tier.
That connection could give Wasabi additional strategic credibility as it targets workloads that need faster access than conventional capacity-oriented object storage. It may also lead to closer commercial relationships. However, the public announcements do not disclose a joint venture, exclusive hardware-supply arrangement, co-marketing agreement, distribution deal or specific product integration. Bayer declined to detail any expanded technology or marketing partnership in his CRN interview.
What Wasabi means by “AI storage”
“AI storage” is not one technical category. It describes several points in an AI data pipeline where storage performance, cost and accessibility matter:
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- Keeping large training datasets available to compute clusters.
- Preparing, transforming and repeatedly reading data before training.
- Saving model checkpoints and other model artifacts.
- Serving data for real-time inference.
- Retaining logs, telemetry and observability data.
- Processing video, audio, images and other media used by AI systems.
- Enriching unstructured content with metadata and making it searchable.
- Retaining source data for later retrieval, compliance or new model runs.
Wasabi positions Wasabi Fire as S3-compatible, NVMe-based object storage for AI and machine learning, real-time analytics, media and other latency-sensitive applications. The public material does not provide enough independent benchmark data to establish how Fire compares with hyperscaler performance tiers or dedicated parallel file systems. Fire pricing is sales-led rather than publicly listed.
How the products fit together
- Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage: general-purpose S3-compatible object storage for backups, archives, applications and large datasets.
- Wasabi Fire: the company’s performance-oriented object-storage tier for workloads where latency and throughput are more important.
- Wasabi AiR: an application layer Wasabi describes as using AI to tag and search video, audio, images, PDFs and other unstructured content.
- Covert Copy: a patent-pending cyber-resilience product that Wasabi describes as an invisible, ransomware-resistant recovery copy.
Wasabi’s broader thesis is that AI adds storage demand rather than replacing ordinary enterprise applications. Bayer told CRN that existing customers are expected to adopt AI-related requirements over time, so the company is pursuing one platform for conventional object storage and emerging AI workloads.
Wasabi’s pricing proposition—and its limits
Wasabi’s public Pay-as-you-go Hot Cloud Storage price starts at $7.99 per terabyte per month, according to the pricing page viewed on August 18, 2026. Wasabi advertises no separate egress or API-request fees under its stated policies, but that message is not unlimited free transfer for every usage pattern.
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- A 1 TB monthly minimum applies to Pay-as-you-go object storage, even when actual usage is lower.
- A 90-day minimum storage-duration policy applies; deleting or replacing data earlier can create charges.
- Wasabi’s fair-use policy is intended for reasonable egress. Regularly downloading more data than the amount stored is identified as a poor fit.
- Versioning, immutable copies, logs, overwrites and deleted-object retention can increase the amount of billable storage.
- Fire, AiR, support, Direct Connect and transfer appliances may have separate packaging or sales-led pricing.
Reserved-capacity contracts are available for one-, three- or five-year terms, with discounts varying by term and capacity. Buyers should request a quote that reflects their region, retention rules, data-transfer pattern and recovery requirements rather than assuming the headline Hot Cloud rate applies to every product.
Growth capital is not proof of profitability
Bayer told CRN that Wasabi was prioritizing growth over profitability. The $1.8 billion valuation and more than $600 million of cumulative funding therefore should not be read as evidence of positive cash flow, mature margins or a public-market valuation.
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Where Wasabi fits in the storage market
Wasabi is trying to sell storage economics and data accessibility as an AI enabler, not to compete as a GPU cloud or model provider. Its alternatives occupy different positions:
| Option | Potential advantage | Trade-off to examine |
|---|---|---|
| Hyperscaler object storage, such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage | Broad ecosystems, many storage classes and close integration with cloud compute | Billing can include operation, retrieval, redundancy and transfer charges |
| Backblaze B2 or Cloudflare R2 | Cost-focused or alternative egress economics for particular applications | Compare regions, integrations, support and application performance |
| MinIO | Self-managed or private-cloud S3-compatible storage with infrastructure control | The customer assumes hardware, operations, scaling and support responsibilities |
| Parallel file systems or specialized block storage | May provide semantics and tightly coupled performance needed by demanding compute clusters | Often more complex and less aligned with a simple object-storage pricing model |
Wasabi may fit large datasets with predictable retrieval, backup repositories, media and surveillance archives, S3-compatible applications, and AI projects that need economical access to substantial data. It may fit poorly when an account stores under 1 TB, routinely downloads more than it stores, deletes data before 90 days, generates unusually high request volumes, or requires specialized file or block semantics.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Questions to answer before buying
- Is the required Wasabi region available, and does it meet sovereignty, compliance and recovery requirements?
- Does the application support the needed S3 APIs, IAM controls, multipart uploads, object locking, versioning and lifecycle rules?
- What latency and throughput are actually required, and is ordinary Hot Cloud sufficient?
- If Fire is required, is it generally available in the target geography, what performance commitments apply, and what is the quoted price?
- What happens to the bill if monthly egress exceeds active stored volume?
- How will data be migrated, verified and restored, and is a second cloud or on-premises copy needed?
- Are support, private connectivity, transfer appliances and premium services included in the proposal?
August 2026 update: Seagate’s Lyve Cloud deal
After the January financing, CRN reported that Wasabi planned to acquire Seagate’s Lyve Cloud business, with Seagate becoming a Wasabi shareholder. Financial terms were not disclosed. CEO David Friend described the transaction primarily as a customer-acquisition and infrastructure-capacity move and said Seagate would join Western Digital and Pure/Everpure among Wasabi’s strategic storage-company investors.
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Friend also said Wasabi’s 2026 priorities included rolling out Fire, maintaining stability at exabyte scale, expanding geographically and developing storage-adjacent products. Those are management priorities, not independently verified outcomes of the $70 million round.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the $70 million round mean Wasabi is profitable?
No. Wasabi CFO Michael Bayer told CRN that the company was prioritizing growth over profitability, and the available disclosures do not provide revenue, margin or cash-flow figures.
Is Pure Storage supplying all of the hardware for Wasabi Fire?
That has not been disclosed. Public information supports describing Pure as a strategic investor and existing technology partner, not as an exclusive supplier or formal joint-venture partner.
The Bottom Line
The financing gives Wasabi more capital to expand from predictable-price object storage into higher-performance AI data infrastructure. Its credibility will ultimately depend on Fire’s real-world performance and pricing, continued customer growth, infrastructure economics and a path toward profitability—not on the funding amount or valuation alone.
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