Minio announced $20M funding

Minio (www.minio.io), fast emerging open source object storage player, announced recently a new VC round of $20M for it series A following a seed round of $3.3M in July 2015. Total is now $23.3M. We see Dell Technologies and Intel Capital in addition to previous ones plus Steve Singh, the new CEO fo Docker, as an individual. Interesting and probably too early to understand Dell and Intel money injection.

Starting with the idea to build an open source alternative offering to Amazon S3 with full compatibility with the AWS API, the company changed its vision recently. The team wishes to offer now a neutral object storage layer or service, still open source and still offering S3 access method. In other words, AB Perisamy ambition is to become the Kubernetes of object storage, no other companies can do that, only him for sure.

And this VC round is a confirmation of this strategy even if only a few survivors will stay alive as it exists too many players on the planet.

It's and it was a good approach to consider that S3 is and will be the king and winner as some other player tried to articulate their own approach. The question is not having the best product, it's about having the product that users will use and consume at the right cost. Some people forget this obvious human behavior, purist probably...

In open source, only Ceph, Swift and Minio can survive, other are just toys, for commercial ones, it's even worse as the number of players is much larger so we expect just a few to stay alive and a few of them will become zombie.

The company plays also an interesting role in the industry as several players try to mimic Minio and even use several tools developed by the company. What a recognition, other companies don't really promote that of course...

Starting after several object storage stories, Minio has chosen now a different path with Google, Microsoft and others illustrating again the multi-cloud eldorado and the wish for users to not put their data in the same basket.

For the 3rd times, Minio will join the IT Press Tour in December and we expect as usual plenty of new things. Again Congratulations to the team.