Backblaze

Backblaze

Backblaze was founded in 2007 by Gleb Budman, Brian Wilson, and several other engineers who set out to build a low-cost cloud backup service for consumers and businesses. The firm remained bootstrapped for over a decade before raising a single round of outside capital from TMT Investments in 2012 and later listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker BLZE in November 2021. The company operates from San Mateo, California. The firm deploys capital predominantly into physical infrastructure and proprietary software, targeting the intersection of enterprise backup, cloud storage, and compute-adjacent services. Its asset-class mix is concentrated in real assets — purpose-built data centers in Sacramento and Phoenix, custom-designed high-density Storage Pods, and a single-threaded software layer called Vaults. The company launched Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage in 2015, competing directly with Amazon S3, and later introduced Backblaze Compute in 2022 to offer a limited cloud computing service alongside its core object storage. Confirmed use cases include application storage, media backup, and archive, with named clients across video production, SaaS, and IT services. The firm's geographic footprint covers North America, with service delivery to global customers through its US-based data centers. The company reported roughly three exabytes of data under management as of 2024 with no disclosed number of investment professionals. In November 2021, Backblaze completed its IPO on Nasdaq, raising net proceeds near the midpoint of its $15–$17 per share range (per the firm's November 2021 S-1 filing). The firm also operates Backblaze Drive Stats, an ongoing public dataset of hard-drive failure rates drawn from its infrastructure fleet, which functions as both a transparency mechanism and a demand-generation tool for the brand. Backblaze's structural differentiator is vertical integration of the hardware and software stack for cost leadership, a playbook more common in hyperscale operators than in publicly traded cloud companies. Its Storage Pods — open-specification, custom-built storage servers — allow the firm to achieve a per-terabyte cost of service that it publishes transparently, a level of pricing openness that is structurally rare in enterprise IT procurement. The combination of listed equity, a single-threaded codebase, and self-manufactured infrastructure forms an architecture distinct from both venture-backed platforms and the high-margin bundled cloud services of large-cap competitors.