Multi-Cloud Storage Startup MinIO Becomes Unicorn with $103 Mn Funding Led by Intel Capital

MinIO Founders - (L-R) Jishnu Bhattachargee, Garima Kapoor and AB Periasamy MinIO

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.

“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. “Developers represent the engine of value creation in the enterprise and MinIO’s object storage suite is uniquely suited for their evolving requirements. MinIO’s power, simplicity and capacity to run anywhere — from the edge to the cloud — make it one of the most compelling companies in the storage space."

MinIO has established itself as the leader in AWS S3 compatible, multi-cloud object storage. Available on every cloud, MinIO has more than 1.2M 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.

MinIO continues to extend its feature leadership with the addition of click to deploy capabilities on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. This complements MinIO’s market-leading capabilities in information lifecycle management, ransomware protection and active-active, strictly consistent multi-site replication.

"High performance, multi-cloud object storage represents a foundational component in the modern software stack," said Vikas Parekh, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. "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. We are delighted to partner with Anand Babu Periasamy, Garima Kapoor and the team as they ramp up commercialization of the technology.”

MinIO has seen massive adoption from organizations around the globe. Growth metrics include:

• In the last year, ARR grew by over 201%
• MinIO’s customer count grew by over 208% in 2021 alone
• Total number of Docker pulls of 762,000,000, now averaging over 1,000,000 per day
• More than 31,000 GitHub stars and 16,000+ MinIO Slack community members

Open source under GNU AGPL v3, MinIO has received more than 9,000 pull requests from 855 contributors since 2015.

“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 has established itself as the leader in the space and Nexus is proud to have partnered with AB, Garima, and team MinIO from Day 1, in their journey of building this category-defining company.”

MinIO is an increasingly key component of its customer’s software stack as reflected in these quotes:

“MinIO is a foundational component of our Epiphany Data Foundation™ and Panoptic™ Compliance Audit Platform that provides the data ingestion, auditing and machine learning capabilities at PRGX,” said Amir Karuppaiah, CTO of PRGX USA Inc. “Together, we are on the journey of cloud-native solutions with data lakes and advanced, throughput-oriented machine learning approaches that deliver secure, accurate insights to our customers”.

"Rakuten Symphony was created with a vision that modern telco infrastructure should be cloud-native, open and interoperable, giving mobile network operators the ability to build, deploy and scale at speeds and low costs never before seen," commented Tareq Amin, CEO at Rakuten Symphony. "To achieve this we need like-minded partners like MinIO to enable operational efficiencies from the edge to the cloud."

MinIO is a high performance, Kubernetes-native, S3 compatible object store for a broad range of data storage use cases. Its performance dramatically exceeds comparable object stores, delivering tens of gigabytes of data per node in throughput. The performance characteristics have made MinIO the object store of choice for leading machine learning frameworks, analytics applications, databases, web applications and other performance-oriented workloads. MinIO’s architecture is renowned for its simplicity and scales from TBs to EBs easily.

MinIO has a subsidiary in Bangalore, India and is rapidly expanding their engineering footprint in that geography. MinIO has dozens of customers across India, Asia and the Middle East.

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.”

Read Garima and CEO, AB Periasamy’s blog post to learn more about the latest funding round and how it will support MinIO’s vision for an object storage centric world.

About MinIO

MinIO is pioneering high performance, Kubernetes-native object storage for the multi-cloud. The software-defined, Amazon S3-compatible object storage system is used by more than half of the Fortune 500. With 760M+ Docker pulls, MinIO is the fastest-growing cloud object storage company and is consistently ranked by industry analysts as a leader in object storage. Founded in 2014, the company is backed by Intel Capital, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, General Catalyst and key angel investors.

Intel Invests ₹ 1,895 Cr for 0.39% Stake in Jio Platforms

Silicon Valley based American technology giant Intel, through its Venture Capital arm, Intel Capital, is investing ₹ 1,894.50 Crore in Reliance Industries' Jio Platforms for a 0.39% stake in the company. Post this deal, Jio Platforms will have an enterprise valuation of ₹ 5.16 Lakh Crore.

With this deal, Jio Platforms becomes the only company with the largest continuous fund-raise in the world, to date. In last 11 weeks, Intel deal will be 12th investment in Jio Platforms.

So far, Jio Platforms has raised ₹ 117,588.45 crore from leading technology investors including Facebook, Silver Lake Partners (two investments), Vista Equity Partners, General Atlantic, KKR, Mubadala, ADIA, TPG, L Catterton, PIF and Intel.

Late last month, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund PIF had invested ₹11,367 crore in Jio, for a 2.32% stake.

Mr. Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries, said, "We are extremely delighted to deepen our ties with technology leaders that embody our vision of transforming India into a leading Digital Society in the world. Intel is a true industry leader, working towards creating world-changing technology and innovations. Intel Capital has an outstanding record of being a valuable partner for leading technology companies globally. We are therefore excited to work together with Intel to advance India's capabilities in cutting-edge technologies that will empower all sectors of our economy and improve the quality of life of 1.3 billion Indians."

Mr. Wendell Brooks, Intel Capital President, said, "Jio Platforms' focus on applying its impressive engineering capabilities to bring the power of low-cost digital services to India aligns with Intel's purpose of delivering breakthrough technology that enriches lives. We believe digital access and data can transform business and society for the better. Through this investment, we are excited to help fuel digital transformation in India, where Intel maintains an important presence."

Helpshift Secures $23M in Series B Funding to Bring In-App Customer Support to the Masses

Helpshift, the company revolutionizing the customer support experience on mobile devices, today announced it closed a $23 Million Series B with participation from new investors, Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and all previously existing investors, including Intel Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, True Ventures and Visionnaire Ventures—bringing the company’s total capital raised to $36.2 Million.

“Our continued growth is a direct reflection of a capital-intensive support industry that’s ready for change. Consumers are tired of waiting for support agents to get back to them, and companies are tired of staffing expensive support teams to answer common, or even predictable, problems in the first place. People want immediate help, wherever they are, especially when using mobile applications,” said Abinash Tripathy, CEO and co-founder of Helpshift. “This is the year we champion a new model of support, one that’s better for both consumers, as well as the companies serving them.”

Since its inception in 2012, Helpshift has continually pushed the market forward, being the first to offer a fully native mobile support experience. The company has since expanded its offering, making it easy to help customers on whatever platform they happen to be on, in their exact moment of need.

Some of the customers benefiting from radically improved customer experience and agent efficiency across their teams thanks to Helpshift include: Zynga, VirginMedia, Microsoft, WesternUnion, Flipboard, Shyp, Luxe, WordPress and thousands of other industry leading brands, startups, and developers.

“Helpshift has been a great partner for Microsoft and our investment today represents our confidence in their messaging-based approach to customer service, as we hold a shared value of providing the seamless experience customers want,” said Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president, Microsoft Ventures.

“Businesses everywhere are moving away from email and embracing intuitive in-app support as the future. The tech industry saw this just one month back when Uber announced they had rolled out an easy to use in-app customer support model to deliver what they called ‘service at the push of a button.’ At Helpshift, we saw this years ago. We’ll continue to see many more companies make the change towards better, faster, in-app customer support.  Our new financing will help fuel our continued expansion across teams in R&D, sales and marketing.  We’re humbled by the confidence our investors, customers, and industry influencers have in us to build on this strong momentum,” continued Tripathy.

Intel Capital Invested in Savaari and Perptuuiti

Intel Capital has invested $65Mn in 16 tech startups including two Indian tech startups - Savaari, a Bangalore based Car Rental startup and Perpetuuiti Technosoft, a Mumbai-based enterprise IT company. Aaprt from India Intel Capital announced 16 new investments spanning 9 countries and totaling $65 million.

Savaari provides online car rental services in India currently for 60 cities of the country through 158 vendors. The Bangalore based startup had previously raised Rs.5 crores of funding from Inventus Capital. Savari so far has covered 1 crore KMs since 2006, and did 10 Lac trips.

Perpetuuiti Technosoft on other hand provides services such as business continuity consulting, IT disaster recovery management and business process automation. Mumbai based Perpetuuiti has customers like TCS, IBM, Vodafone and others.

Intel Capital this time has invested in 16 startups of varied sectors such as cloud, datacenter, mobile technologies and consumer-related services. Intel Capital is Intel's global investment and M&A organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide and so far invested more than US$11 billion in over 1,322 companies in 54 countries.

Other than 2 Indian Startups Intel Capital's other investment includes  cloud consultancy CloudFX (Singapore); cloud storage software provider Cloudian(Japan/USA); community website and services platform CSDN (China); 3-D software developer DotProduct(USA); cloud file service Fileforce (Japan); interactive video platform Interlude (Israel); high-speed connectivity products company Lintes Technologies (Taiwan); mobile news syndicator Mobiles Republic (France/USA); visual merchandising and analytics solutions Prism Skylabs (USA); hybrid storage provider Reduxio Systems (Israel); chip simulation acceleration Rocketick (Israel);semiconductor materials developer SBA Materials (USA); open source database solutions SkySQL (Finland); and wireless electricity developer WiTricity (USA).