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.

Zomato May Acquire Grofers for $750 Mn - Report

Gurugram-based food delivery and restaurant discovery platform Zomato is reportedly in talks to acquire online grocery firm Grofers in an all-stock deal, reported Economic Times, citing two people privy to the matter.

Japan's SoftBank Vision Fund, which is the largest shareholder in Grofers, may look to invest around $100-200 million in the merged entity, said the report. Notably, SoftBank is also an investor in Uber, and in February, Uber sold its India food delivery business UberEats to Zomato.

The development comes at time when Zomato launched 'Zomato Market' for delivery of essential products and announced a tie-up with Grofers to deliver essential items during the nationwide lockdown due to Coronavirus. Zomato launched 'Zomato Market' was launched around the country amid the lockdown.

Venture capital fund Sequoia Capital is a common investor in both Zomato and Grofers. Zomato is currently valued at around $3.2 billion, while Grofers is valued at around $750 million (around Rs 5,700 crore) post its last funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund in December.

In September last year, Grofers had announced to add 700 Kirana Stores onto its network and targeting $1 Billion in revenue by 2019-end.

If the deal materializes, it will be the second big acquisition made by Zomato which acquired the Indian operations of UberEats earlier this year to bolster its food-delivery offering in the domestic market.

In an event in December last year, Zomato Founder & CEO Deepinder Goyal had said that Zomato is looking to raise up to USD 600 million (around Rs 4,276 crore) by January this year.

SoftBank Vision Fund to Invest $2-4 Billion in India over Next 2 Years

Japanese SoftBank Group's $100 Bn fund, SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF), may invest another $2-4 billion in India over the next two years, reported The Economic Times citing Rajeev Misra, director and executive vice president at SoftBank Group Corp who heads the SoftBank Vision Fund.

SVF, which is the largest pool of private capital globally, is looking to back Indian startups working in sectors such as financial services. The investment planned will be both new as well as follow-on investments in its portfolio firms, which require capital.

According to SVF head, "Financial services is broken in India, and it can be the biggest multiplier of growth. This is a great opportunity that we would look at here,” he said to Economic Times.

He however didn't commented on the reports suggesting that Softbank is investing $1 billion In Piramal's Financial Services to create a 'Big' FinTech Platform in India.

Besides, Softbank group will also help bring more than 20 of its portfolio companies to India by making joint venture (JV) partnerships with local firms.

In its no risk strategy, Softbank's potential JV partners will provide management, staffing and help Softbank's portfolio firms handle the regulatory issues and customise to the Indian market.

"These products have no competitors here. This is equally an opportunity to create jobs here," said Misra on striking local partnerships with local businesses.

Since May, SVF led the $152 million Series F funding of Policybazaar Group, the parent of online portals - PolicyBazaar and PaisaBazaar. This was followed by leading $200 million funding of Grofers, pushing the Gurgaon-based online grocer's valuation to almost $1 billion.

In this month, Ola Electric, the electric mobility arm of Ola, had secured a funding of over Rs 1,725 crore (~ US$250 million) from SoftBank, who is is also the single largest investor in Ola.

In May, www.indianweb2.com reported that Deepcore, the AI-focused incubator and subsidiary of SoftBank Group, is planning to raise more than $55 million for its second artificial intelligence (AI) investment fund dedicated to promising startups in artificial intelligence.

Online Grocer Grofers Raises Fresh $200 Mn in Funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund

Indian online grocery startup, Grofers has raised $200 million in a fresh funding led by Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF), pushing the Gurgaon-based company’s valuation to almost $1 billion. Existing investors Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital along with new investor KTB also contributed in the funding round, reported Bloomberg.

The funding comes with just two months after, Japan's SVF had invested $60 million in Grofers funding in March, when Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital also contributed to that round.

With latest fund infusion, Grofers has raised a total of about $500 Mn in funding over 8 rounds, including this one. The company said it’s prioritizing profit given the sliver of market share served by online merchants.

Albinder Dhindsa, co-founder and CEO, Grofers, said in statement, "Grofers had a top line of $400 million and grew 8X in the last two years. Grofers would become India’s largest online grocer this quarter."

Grofers faces fierce competition from both local and global players in India's $600 billion e-grocery market. Last month, Alibaba-backed online grocer BigBasket raised $40 million from CDC Group, the UK government's development finance institution. This was followed by Rs 20 crore venture debt funding of MilkBasket, which came from Flipkart co-founder Sachin Bansal’s BAC Acquisitions. Milkbasket is an online grocery and milk delivery startup, which is also headquartered in Gurgaon.

Besides Bigbasket, Walmart-owned Flipkart, Amazon.com Inc. also compete with Grofers. Both Walmart and Amazon have been investing heavily in their Indian business. Last year, Alibaba led a $300 million investment in BigBasket, pushing its valuation to $950 million.

The share of India’s online grocery market in Asia currently stands at 0.05% and is expected to touch 0.6% by 2022, according to international research organisation IGD.

Some of the major companies that are currently working in the online grocery market in India are SoCoMo Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Grofers India Pvt. Ltd., Town Essentials Pvt Ltd., Nuvo Logistics Private Limited, MN&C Supply Links Retail Pvt Ltd., BigBasket India Pvt. Ltd., Aaram Shop Pvt. Ltd., Natures Basket Limited, Local Banya Pvt. Ltd., Supermarket Grocery Supplies Pvt. Ltd., Fiora Hypermarket Limited, Godrej Nature’s Basket Ltd., Ekstop Pvt. Ltd., MyGrahak Shopping Online Limited, Jiffstore Software Labs Pvt. Ltd., PepperTap Ltd., SRS E-Retail Limited, Reliance Retail Pvt. Ltd., ZopNow Retail Pvt. Ltd.

PolicyBazaar Gets $152 Mn in 1st Tranche of Series F led by SoftBank Vision Fund

Gurgaon-based ETechAces Marketing and Consulting Pvt. Ltd. ("Policybazaar Group"), the parent of online portals - PolicyBazaar and PaisaBazaar, has secured about $152 million (Rs 1,059.4 crore) in the first tranche of its Series F funding round, led by Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund, according to the company’s filings with the Registrar of Companies (RoC) sourced by paper.vc.

The capital infusion also saw participation from InfoEdge via its subsidiary Diphda Internet Services, private equity firm True North, and Startup Holding. SVF India Holdings (Cayman) Limited (Soft Bank), a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Vision Fund L.P. has invested about $68 million (Rs 473.27 crore) by subscribing to 10,371 Series F cumulative compulsory convertible preference shares (CCCPS) and five equity shares worth Rs 4,56,345 each of EtechAces.

Diphda Internet Services has injected about $59.3 million (Rs 413.59 crore) by subscribing to 9,059 Series F CCCPS and four equity shares, while True North has purchased 3,775 CCCPS and one equity share for an investment of $24.8 million (Rs 172.27 crore) in the company. Last year in June, the PolicyBazaar parent had announced a fundraise of over $200 million in Series F round.

In July, Singapore government-backed investment firm Temasek and Info Edge (India) Ltd co-invested $27.6 million (Rs 190.5 crore) in EtechAces. The company also counts New York investment firm Tiger Global Management, PremjiInvest of Wipro's Azim Premzi, Chiratae Ventures and Inventus Capital Partners among its investors.

Founded in 2008, by Alok Bansal and Yashish Dahiya, Poicybazaar group has so far raised a total of about $347 Mn in funding over seven rounds including the latest one.

Last year the company had launched healthtech platform, docprime.com, and also forayed into the UAE market, with the launch of its new venture, Policybazaar.ae, an online financial products marketplace, that would list insurance and lending products on its platform.

Notably, Paisabazaar, an online marketplace for all lending and investment products, is a venture spun out of Policybazaar. Policybazaar has till raised about $150 million in six separate funding rounds.

Source - DealStreetAsia

Grofers Raises $60 Mn from Softbank Vision Fund at Valuation of $425 Mn

Exactly a year after raising $62 million, in Series E funding round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group, online grocery delivery company Grofers has raised $60 million in fresh funding from SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF), reported Economic Times.

SoftBank Vision Fund (SVF) is a subsidiary of SoftBank that invests $100 million or more in growth stage leading companies.

Other investor - Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital  also contributed to the funding. According to the report, SoftBank invested $37.49 million in Grofers, Tiger Global pumped in $19.99 million, while Sequoia Capital injected $1.99 million in the startup.

As Grofers is banking on its FMCG private labels to drive its second phase of growth, the fresh infusion would help Grofers continue its expansion into the fast-moving consumer goods (FMGC) segment, said the report.

The latest round of funding has pushed the company's valuation to $425 million, according to estimates from business intelligence platform Paper.vc. The Series E round of last year gave the company a pre-money valuation of $238 million.

This was the first tranche of a larger $120-140 million Series F financing round that Grofers is looking for. 

Grofers has raised just over $300 million since its inception in 2013, according to its Crunchbase profile.

Grofers has been putting together a strategy to make cheaper consumer goods available to the masses. "There are logistics and storage costs involved in transporting goods from the manufacturers to the wholesaler and then to the retailer. All of that goes away in our case," founder Saurabh Kumar had told Economic Times earlier.

While Grofers is yet to attract new investors to conttribute the balance capital for Series F closure, SVF is expected to invest a further $40 million in the company.

According to regulatory filings made in Singapore, the renegotiated shareholders agreement for Grofers also caps Softbank’s maximum stake in the company to 49%. 

SVF, which has a total size of massive $100 billion, has made 54 investments. Its most recent investment was in this month when it invested whopping $1.5 billion in Beijing-based Chehaoduo, an online car trading platform that directly links individual car sellers and buyers.