Caeves promotes a modern file tiering solutions fueled by AI

Caeves Technology joined the IT Press Tour last week in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The company is a New Jersey-based startup founded in 2024 by the team behind Talon Storage Solutions, an entity co-founded in 2012 that developed edge caching technology before being acquired by NetApp in March 2020. After five years scaling NetApp's cloud data services, the founding team launched Caeves, operating in stealth mode before releasing its flagship product, Caeves Intelligent Deep Storage, first in private preview on Microsoft Azure in August 2025, then in general availability worldwide in February 2026. The leadership team includes Shirish H. Phatak as CEO and CTO, Jaap van Duijvenbode as VP of Product and Customer Experience, and Andrew Mullen as SVP of Sales and Alliances.

The company tackles two major structural problems in enterprise data management. The first is economic: according to Gartner, 30% of enterprise storage budgets are spent on cold or redundant data that delivers zero active business insight, while data volumes double every two years with no sign of slowing. The second is AI readiness: 85% of unstructured data is created once and never touched again by analytics or artificial intelligence tools. When data is archived to cold tiers or legacy systems, it becomes completely invisible to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Search, and all modern AI tools, directly undermining the ROI of enterprise AI investments. As Jensen Huang noted at Nvidia GTC in March 2026, unstructured data remains largely impossible to query, search, or index at scale without a smarter infrastructure layer.

Caeves Intelligent Deep Storage is a cloud-native solution built exclusively on Microsoft Azure, combining intelligent tiering, multi-protocol access supporting SMB and NFS, and native integration with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The platform deploys in under 30 minutes entirely within the customer's own Azure tenant, with no data ever leaving the customer's environment. It provides automatic tiering from Hot to Cool to Archive landing on Azure Object Storage, reducing storage costs by up to 70% without any loss of access or performance. A key differentiator is the Caeves Copilot Connector, which indexes historical archives directly into Microsoft Graph, making them accessible through Microsoft 365 Search and Microsoft Copilot with no custom RAG pipeline or additional infrastructure required. Unlike most competitors, Caeves stores data in native Azure Blob format, meaning customers retain full access at all times with no proprietary encoding, no extraction fees, and no lock-in, at a cost ranging from $0.01 to $0.03 per GB per month.

The pricing model is entirely capacity-based and available through the Microsoft Marketplace, offering a free tier up to 5TB for pilots and testing, with rates decreasing from $0.03/GB/month for small teams down to $0.01/GB/month beyond 1PB. For organizations managing more than 200TB, the cost of Caeves is typically recovered within the first month of tiering savings alone.

Looking ahead, a minor release is planned for September 2026, followed by a major version in Q1 2027 featuring an Enterprise Management Plane with ROI dashboard, policy management, compliance and governance tools, and an MCP Server enabling integration with Claude, Gemini, LangChain, Azure OpenAI, and Microsoft Foundry. The long-term vision is to position Caeves as the intelligence and context layer for enterprise data estates within the Azure ecosystem, evolving from a storage optimizer into a full data intelligence platform with autonomous tiering operations and deep integration with Copilot Studio.