MINIO

AB Periasamy and Garima Kapoor founded MinIO in 2014. Periasamy was not new to this.

He had co-founded Gluster, an open-source distributed storage company that Red Hat acquired in 2011. With MinIO, the bet was on a specific shift.

Amazon S3 had turned object storage into a universal standard, but companies were stuck if they wanted that same experience outside Amazon, on their own servers or across multiple clouds. MinIO built lightweight, fast, S3-compatible storage software that runs anywhere, and gave it away as open source to spread fast.

MinIO is open-source and free to download, which is exactly how it got everywhere. The company makes money by selling commercial licenses, enterprise support, and the features large organizations need for production deployments.

Because it speaks the Amazon S3 language, MinIO slots into existing tools without rewrites. Companies use it to keep control of their data, avoid cloud lock-in, and store the enormous datasets that feed analytics and AI.

The core product is the MinIO object storage server, an S3-compatible system that runs on anything from a laptop to a giant cluster. Around it sit enterprise features for security, replication, and management, plus a commercial product aimed at large-scale AI data.

The whole thing is designed to be simple, fast, and portable across clouds and data centers.

Developer adoption first, revenue later. MinIO became wildly popular through open-source downloads, racking up well over a billion container pulls because engineers could spin it up instantly and for free.

Once it was embedded in production systems, the enterprise license and support business followed. As AI exploded, MinIO leaned into being the high-performance storage foundation for training data and AI workloads, which need to move huge files fast.

MinIO competes against the very cloud giants whose standard it adopted. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all sell object storage as a core service, and convincing companies to run their own storage instead is a constant uphill argument.

There is also the classic open-source tension of converting free users into paying customers without alienating the community. Monetizing software that people are used to getting for nothing is the hardest trick in the business.

MinIO has raised about $126 million. The headline round was a $103 million Series B in January 2022 that valued the company at $1 billion and made it a unicorn.

Intel Capital led it, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and Nexus Venture Partners joining. The investors were betting that companies want cloud-style storage they actually control.