Backblaze doubles up on sales chiefs to chase AI storage demand

Backblaze now has two chief sales officers to sell its B2 cloud storage services.

Anuj Kumar has just been appointed chief revenue officer while the previous incumbent, Jason Wakeam, is now chief enterprise sales officer. Wakeam became CRO in July 2024.

CEO Gleb Budman said: "We are in the middle of a fundamental transformation. The opportunity in front of us demands a revenue leader who has done this at scale and in markets directly adjacent to ours. Anuj built one of the most impressive cloud revenue growth stories in the enterprise infrastructure space at NetApp. He understands the neocloud and AI infrastructure ecosystem, he knows how to move upmarket without losing the product-led motion that made us who we are, and he can drive the pipeline discipline and execution rigor this phase of our growth requires."

Prior to Backblaze, Kumar served as SVP and General Manager for North America at SUSE, and previously as CRO at HUMAN Security. Before that, he held roles at NetApp, VMware, Rackspace, VeriSign, and Red Hat. As SVP of Worldwide Cloud Sales and Customer Success at NetApp, he grew the company's cloud business from $100 million to nearly $600 million ARR.

Backblaze says that it's pursuing two parallel AI growth vectors: one on the supply side and one on the demand side. On the supply side, the company serves neocloud GPU providers – an estimated $14 billion storage opportunity by 2030 – as the storage backbone for their platforms. On the demand side, it supports AI-native developers and enterprise users building applications that generate and process large-scale datasets. The company says that it already serves hundreds of AI companies across use cases including model training, audio and video generation, and enterprise AI application development.

Kumar said: "The buildout of AI infrastructure is one of the largest capital replatformings in the history of enterprise technology, and storage underpins it. Backblaze has built the right platform for this moment – high performance, S3-compatible, cost-efficient, and free from lock-ins that constrain what customers can do. My job is to make sure the market understands this, and to put in place the GTM motion and partnerships that turn that awareness into durable, compounding revenue."

Budman has tasked Wakeam with pursuing major deals, with a focus on AI platforms.

We've been told by a Backblaze spokesbod: "Anuj is our CRO and oversees all sales and GTM, including Jason. Jason reports to Anuj. While Jason does have "chief" in his name, he is not leading any other part of our sales operation (beyond enterprise accounts) at this time."

Backblaze hired Dan Spraggins as SVP of Engineering in January and Rhett Dillingham as SVP of Product in February, strengthening its product development team. Tina Cessna, the former SVP of Engineering, began a career break in September last year.

Meanwhile, Backblaze competitor Wasabi, which raised $70 million for AI cloud storage in January, has just acquired Seagate's Lyve Cloud business.