Online storage service Wasabi, which offers one terabyte of storage for $5/month, raises $68M Series B from Swiss entrepreneur Ernesto Bertarelli and others
Chances are you see a story about cloud storage, and you yawn and move on, but Wasabi, a startup from the folks who brought you Carbonite backup, might make you pause.
Context & Ripple Effects
Wasabi was built by the team behind Carbonite backup, and its pitch is a flat $5 per terabyte per month aimed squarely at AWS S3's pricing. The $68M Series B, backed by Swiss entrepreneur Ernesto Bertarelli, is the first big institutional bet on that undercut-the-hyperscaler model.
The round reads differently with hindsight: this same company went on to raise a Series C led by Fidelity Management in 2021 and then a $250M Series D at a $1.1B-plus valuation in 2022, making the 2018 raise the entry point of a sustained venture-funded assault on incumbent cloud storage economics.
First-order effects
- Wasabi gets the capital to build out its own storage footprint and keep honoring a $5/TB price point that requires heavy upfront infrastructure spend before margins appear.
- AWS faces a named competitor whose entire go-to-market is a public price comparison against S3, forcing the incumbent to defend on bundling and ecosystem rather than rate cards.
Second-order effects
- Investors treat low-cost storage as a fundable category rather than a solved market: Nasuni's $60M enterprise file-storage round and VAST Data's $100M flash-storage round show parallel bets up and down the same stack.
- Buyers gain leverage to unbundle storage from compute clouds, pressuring every full-service provider whose storage revenue cross-subsidizes other services.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, commodity object storage separates from the hyperscaler bundle entirely, with specialized providers competing on price while AWS, Google, and Microsoft compete on integration — a structural split between storage utilities and cloud platforms.
The trend: Cloud storage is splitting off from full-service clouds into venture-backed low-cost specialists, with successive mega-rounds underwriting a price war against AWS S3.