Wasabi gets quarter billion credit facility

S3 cloud storage provider Wasabi has arranged a $250 million credit facility after raising $70 million for AI cloud funding in January.

The credit deal was led by Bain Capital’s Private Credit Group with contributions from BTG Pactual Global Alternatives, Neuberger Specialty Finance, Energy Impact Partners, and Aksia. It will support continued investment in Wasabi’s cloud storage platform, infrastructure, and broader global expansion.

Wasabi CFO and EVP Michael Bayer said: “This is a more selective private lending market, but we’ve built a strong, disciplined business that continues to attract support from leading financial institutions. We’re investing in our infrastructure to meet growing demand for data, especially as AI and modern applications require scalable, accessible storage.” 

This credit deal follows Wasabi buying Seagate’s LyveCloud storage operation earlier this month, with its S3-compatible cloud storage and Lyve Mobile rugged disk drive data transfer business.

Why arrange such a credit facility three months after pulling in $70 million? Bayer said that, at a basic level, he divides spending into capital and expenses. The equity raises are for capital spending with credit facilities for expenses. As we understand it, in this view, capital spending can buy datacenters while expense spending fits them out. Bayer tells us: "I tend to think to use equity for expansion investment. I see the best use of credit is for capital equipment.”

Andrea Lucido, a Bain Capital director, said: ”Wasabi’s growth trajectory, strong fundamentals, and expanding global customer base reflect the growing need for reliable, cost-effective cloud storage. The company is delivering innovative and secure data infrastructure at a time when data is becoming increasingly critical to how enterprises operate, make decisions, and adopt technologies such as AI.” 

Bayer says Wasabi is becoming AI-centric: “Wasabi's an AI company today. We're introducing agentic approaches and autonomy within our processes. We're adopting all of the latest tools for everything from development to customer success, to even our sales processes and our internal processes. We're going to be an AI company. And I think this is the year where really everyone transforms into being an AI company.”

In fact its market is becoming AI infused: “in that world, whatever AI agents we have, they're going to need lots and lots and lots of data, and it's got to be stored someplace. And we want to be the place where people store their AI data. … with Wasabi, those AIs can be running anywhere. You can use any company's AI solutions and access your data from any place, and we don't charge for that egress.”

He reckons: “Companies are focusing more on inference data and large lakehouses, if you will. And those are actually the applications that we're supporting with our AI and AI adjacent companies today.” AI agents need data fast, possibly faster than Wasabi’s Fire tier can provide. Will Wasabi provide faster storage? On-prem caching maybe?

Bayer said: “I think we're looking long-term at solving all of those needs. Fire is our first big step into delivering exactly what the AI markets need. And over time, we understand what those needs are and we'll evolve the product to serve those…. we do have solutions right down the street from you in our data centre. You can have your data resident in a very low latency setup and access IBM Cloud through our partnership with IBM. … I think over time, you'll see us expanding more and more into environments where you can solve that need.”

We asked about future plans and Bayer said: “The fact that we are able to raise significant equity dollars, significant credit dollars for a company of our size, and also partner with a very sophisticated storage company to build on the operations that they have today, all speak to the thought around our future plans, which I just can't get into today.”

We expect Wasabi to add AI-powered data selection, filtering, and processing capabilities to its customer offer, helping AI pipeline activities.

Bootnote

Wasabi has grown to 500 plus employees globally, serving over 120,000 customers around the world, with more than 3 EB if their data, from 16 locations since it started out in 2018. The company believes it's the world’s leading pure-play cloud storage vendor.