The 10 Hottest Data Storage Startups Of 2024
These 10 data storage startups are looking to help customers manage their all-important data with new ways of providing disaster recovery and archiving, data protection, high-speed and secure file sharing and collaboration, and the latest in cost-cutting technologies.
Data Marches On To The Cloud
The data storage industry continues to transform itself as customers’ data increasingly moves to the cloud. Analyst firm IDC, for instance, in September reported that, while spending on cloud infrastructure compute and storage in the second quarter of 2024 increased 61.5 percent year-over-year to $42.9 billion, non-cloud segment spending rose 41.4 percent to $19.4 billion.
That shift in spending habits is leading major storage vendors such as NetApp, Pure Storage, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Dell to shift more and more of their R&D towards a cloud and hybrid cloud focus.
At the same time, it is also creating opportunities for startups to carve their niche in the cloud storage market.
[Related: Storage 100: The Digital Bridge Between The Cloud And On-Premises Worlds]
Storage startups are increasingly born in the cloud, with little or no legacy business to interfere with their plans to find new ways to store data. This in theory gives them a leg-up on their older, more established competitors as they gravitate to more niche parts of the storage business.
Many of the latest startups into the storage market exemplify that transition. Included in the list of storage startups for the first half of 2024 are companies developing novel ways to automate data backups, recover from IT disasters, increase the performance and ease of file transfers, improve file sync and sharing, manage large data sets, and even make it easier to move tape backup and archive data to the cloud. And these startups are increasingly using AI to build their technologies.
CRN takes a look at 10 startups looking to bring new storage capabilities to market and in the process stake their claim to a bigger part of the business going forward.
Arpio
CEO and Co-founder: Doug Neumann
Headquarters: Durham, N.C.
Website: https://arpio.io/
Arpio develops disaster recovery technology for Amazon Web Services environments. The company promises a full recovery of a customer’s entire AWS operating environment, including storage, compute, network, security, monitoring, and everything else necessary to recover the entire environment in the event of an outage. It works with nearly any architecture including virtualized, containerized, and serverless workloads and their managed data services. For security, Arpio is SOCII-certified and HIPAA-compliant. Immutable backups are kept in an air-gapped environment for ransomware recovery. Arpio last year closed an $8.2-million seed funding round let by S3 Ventures and Companion Ventures.
Atombeam
Chairman and CEO: Charles Yeomans
Headquarters: Moraga, Calif.
Website: https://www.atombeamtech.com/
Atombeam develops technology for reducing the space data needs when stored and transmitted, including the smallest machine-generated or IoT data which normally cannot be compressed, according to the company. Its Neurpac Platform uses AI and machine learning to automatically generate and deploy codewords to be used as a more efficient representation of the data being transmitted from the edge to the cloud, achieving up to a 75-percent reduction in bandwidth. Atombeam this year plans to release Neurcom which works on a neural net AI to enhance the capabilities of video and audio codecs to enable greater data throughput while retaining and enhancing the quality of image or audio. The company is using equity crowdfunding to raise funds.
CESS
Chairman and co-founder: Nicholas Zaldastani
Headquarters: Manchester, U.K.
Website: https://cess.cloud/
CESS builds a blockchain-powered decentralized storage and content delivery network infrastructure. Users and creators can use the platform for on-chain data sharing, while builders can develop and deploy DApps (decentralized applications). CESS offers DeOSS, a decentralized object storage service which provides up to 1,000 buckets of storage per account for fast data processing and sharing online, and DeShare, blockchain-powered decentralized cloud storage network that allows users and creators to share data on-chain and builders to create and deploy DApps.
Cloud IBR
CEO and Founder: Gregory Tellone
Headquarters: Woodbury, N.Y.
Website: https://cloudibr.com/
Cloud IBR develops a backup recovery SaaS platform provides automated one-click disaster recovery for Veeam backups stored in Backblaze or Wasabi Object Storage. It recovers mission-critical data when ransomware strikes, and provides one-click failover of Veeam Backups stored offsite in Backblaze or Wasabi Object Storage. It builds an on-demand bare metal cloud server and storage infrastructure as needed after an incident or for compliance testing without the need for any capital expenditures.
Entegria Systems
CTO and co-founder: Tony Tancredi
Headquarters: Mt. Laurel, N.J.
Website: https://www.entegriasystems.com/
Entegria Systems digital file management software that uses the latest encryption, compliance, and internet technologies. The company’s line card includes RheoWorx, a secure managed data workflow system that enables businesses to build automated processes for data movement, and FastSSR, a software for high-speed and secure TCPIP mainframe file transfers.
Eon
CEO and co-founder: Ofir Ehrlich
Headquarters: New York
Website: https://www.eon.io/
Eon, which came out of stealth this year, is the developer of the Eon Cloud Backup Platform which businesses can use to backup data based on their business policies and compliance requirements. This lets Eon automatically assign the appropriate backup policy and retention period, ensuring data is backed up for the right amount of time. The technology contextually understands, classifies, and indexes cloud resources and applications.
Geyser Data
CEO and Co-founder: Nelson Nahum
Headquarters: Tustin, Calif.
Geyser this year came to market with its Geyser Tape-as-a-Service Archive, a multi-tenant application which gives businesses the ability to store their S3-compatible backup and archive data which would normally go to tape on the cloud using Azure or AWS. Stored data is air-gapped for ransomware protection. However, unlike leading archive technologies AWS S3 Glacier or Azure Blob, Geyser’s service has no restore or egress fees. The company’s technology was developed jointly with Spectra Logic, and is integrated with Spectra Logic's Tape Archive Platform-as-a-Service (TAPAS).
Slik
Co-founders: Arpit and Charvi Agarwal
Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.
Website: https://www.sliksafe.com/
Slik is the developer of Slik Safe, a high-speed file management tool with on-device AI and end-to-end encryption. Slik Safe offers decentralized and encrypted file backups and synchronization with encryption for file search and access. Business’ files and folders are backed up with the ability to store, share and share those files, and data is protected on local devices with encryption before being uploaded to the cloud.
Swiss Vault
CEO and co-founder: Bhupinder Bhullar
Headquarters: Princeton, N.J.
Website: https://www.swissvault.global/
Swiss Vault is a developer of software and hardware for storing large amounts of data required for intensive data access and analysis for such industries as genomics, telecommunication, seismic, and astronomy. The company’s Vile Fault System storage and archiving software focuses on reducing the cost protecting data against loss, while its modular hardware aims to cut power consumption and data center footprint.
Upstash
CEO: Enes Akar
Headquarters: San Jose, Calif.
Website: https://upstash.com/
Upstash provides a serverless data platform aimed at developers building data-intensive applications using tools like Redis. Upstash allows users to create a serverless Redis database within seconds, and create a serverless vector database for AI and large language models (LLMs). Pricing for the storage to go with the platform is free for the entry tier for prototyping and hobbyists, or 25 cents per GB.