A Milestone Series B for MinIO

Congratulations to MinIO!‍

Why We Invested in Dell Technologies Capital’s Newest Unicorn

‍On behalf of everyone at Dell Technologies Capital, congratulations to Anand Babu Periasamy, Garima Kapoor, Harshavardhana, and the MinIO team on its $100M Series B funding round led by our friends at Intel Capital. We are thrilled to participate once again along with Softbank and other top tier investors. As we celebrate the company, I wanted to share why we joined MinIO early on its journey, leading their Series A back in 2017.

As an seed-stage company, one of the things that impressed us the most was that MinIO was quick to recognize the explosive growth of unstructured data and the subsequent need for cloud-native object storage. They saw that the data lake would increasingly become the heart of every business, but also that there’d be challenges in how to process the data captured there and turn it into something highly usable .

The closest thing the industry had for large-scale data infrastructure was Hadoop, but while it paved the way, it was hard to operate and fundamentally incompatible with a multi-cloud ecosystem. Customers gravitated towards the AWS S3 model in order to disaggregate storage and compute, which was the anti-thesis of the Hadoop model. But another challenge existed: Amazon S3 is only available within AWS.

MinIO is a high-performance, Kubernetes-native object store. They’ve built a service that is optimized for cloud-native workloads and S3 compatibility. MinIO runs in every major public cloud, private clouds, Kubernetes distributions and – with a binary of less than 100MB – is the only full featured object store capable of running at the edge. Enterprises use MinIO to deliver against ML/AI, analytics, backup and archival workloads – all from their single lightweight platform.

The company is on a similar hypergrowth path as market leaders like Elastic and Hashicorp. The reason, quite simply, is that they’ve taken their time to build the right approach both in terms of their technology and in understanding their customer.

Today, there are no real competitors to MinIO’s object storage technology. For any company that wants to build a data lake on Azure, Google Cloud, on-premises or anywhere else, they need an S3 API and MinIO is the answer. More than 750 organizations, including Microsoft Azure, use MinIO’s S3 Gateway. And published benchmark tests show that MinIO outperforms S3. MinIO also is the only option for customers looking to run containerized applications on-premises. And from what we can see, developers love the experience.

Much of MinIO’s growth is driven by developer customers who are ripping out the traditional data warehouse and Hadoop HDFS-based ecosystem, and then adopting MinIO as the data lake persistence layer. Its hypergrowth is further illustrated by its half a billion+ Docker pulls and more than 31,000 GitHub stars, the most of any object storage database on the market.

We are incredibly proud of the MinIO and the rocket ship they’ve built and can’t wait to see what the next stage of its journey holds!

Gregg Adkin and the DTC Team