2024 was an amazing year of growth for Storj – with incredible achievements for our customers, partners, and collective industry. In October, I was honored to step into the role of Chief Executive Officer of Storj, transitioning from Chief Revenue Officer. First, I want to acknowledge the ground-breaking work of Ben Golub, CEO of Storj since 2018, who now sits as the Executive Chair of our Board. Ben’s work as a leader and mentor was the inspiration for me to be part of Storj.
I want to share my perspective on all the accomplishments, innovations, and what I’m most excited about for Storj in the upcoming year.
Reflecting on a year of 7x growth.
Storj experienced incredible growth in 2024. In the last year, we saw 7x growth, which includes a 20% month over month growth rate in the last six months. Storj is poised to continue this growth into 2025 as evidenced by the important milestones achieved.
Incredible acquisitions.
Among Storj’s milestones achieved in the last year, I’m most proud of our acquisitions of Valdi, the leader in on-demand GPUs for AI, and Petagene, creator of the ground-breaking cunoFS that provides high performance file access to any object storage.
The acquisitions were significant, because Storj now has a platform of disruptive and highly performant cloud services. Together, these capabilities provide seamless access to the distributed cloud for intensive video and AI workloads. This delivers incredible value to customers and partners, with better performance, security, cost, and carbon savings at the edge and around the world.
Storj is also the first low-cost cloud provider to offer compute, surpassing Wasabi and Backblaze.
Solving customer challenges.
Much of our growth can be attributed to our team’s ability to solve complex enterprise challenges. For instance, we worked with an enterprise customer with high upload requirements who needed us to scale quickly before their hyperscaler contract ended. With our SOC2 compliant solution, the Storj team responded quickly and met the customer’s needs, where another cloud provider had failed.
The Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry embraced our unique offerings in 2024. As more media production and post-production work takes place in remote locations. This causes major challenges to adapt to hybrid workflows. With one upload, Storj provides access to editors all over the world for one low price. This overcomes obstacles to solve global challenges for our M&E customers.
We have been proud to onboard both small and large studios, help companies distribute to new countries as a globally fast CDN origin, and even supported innovative productions like the Sphere events in Las Vegas.
Adding capabilities for enterprise.
During 2024, Storj released multiple features for backup and recovery, including achieving Veeam Ready-Object status, releasing S3-compatible Object Lock, and we’re in the process of Veeam Ready Immutability certification. These capabilities, along with special reserved capacity pricing, allow our partners to offer their customers a differentiated alternative to traditional cloud providers.
Making it easier for our partners.
In November, Storj launched the channel-first program to help our partners bring the value of the distributed cloud to their networks. The new program makes it easy for resellers and referral partners to run marketing and sales playbooks for high pain/high value solutions in AI, M&E, and enterprise IT markets.
Strong leadership will continue to guide our growth.
I want to take the time to express my gratitude to the talented team at Storj who I’ve had the pleasure of working with for several years and for the newly added members that joined the Storj team this year. The Storj team has accomplished amazing things over the last year, and I’m very proud to be a part of the incredible engineering innovation happening every day. Our culture of collaboration and compassion at Storj is extremely important and it is put into action daily by this phenomenal team.
The Storj board of directors is now a powerhouse of industry knowledge and support. I am grateful to have the guidance of this incredible team now and moving into 2025. The Storj board includes:
- Ben Golub, Chairman of the Board
- Lorine Pendleton, Founder and Managing Partner, 125 Ventures
- Mairtini Ni Dhomhnaill, Founder, Countsy
- Brian Lillie, President, Rackspace Private Cloud.
This is a thoughtful team full of the right expertise to guide Storj growth in its next chapter.
Our momentum will continue in 2025.
There are so many opportunities in 2025 I’m looking forward to. First, I’m excited about our AI business with Valdi. Our Valdi business unit has seen stellar momentum with 20%-45% growth month over month. We have some new features coming that should make it even more attractive.
Second, I’m excited about our cunoFS launch for the M&E industry. The demand for cunoFS file access to object storage has been overwhelming. The team is working hard to add the integrations requested by some of the largest studios and entertainment organizations in the world.
I’m also looking forward to continuing to develop strong partnerships through distributors and individual resellers to help bring the value of the distributed cloud to more businesses.
I recently spoke with analysts and IT leaders at the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations conference and the most repeated topic was the incredible frustration of working with the hyperscalers and their rising costs. I am confident that Storj will help many of those businesses in 2025 to reduce their cloud costs while improving performance and lowering carbon emissions.
Storj had a breakout year in 2024 and is on a path to incredible growth. I want to thank our Storj customers and community, which I am grateful to for contributing and championing the innovative work we are doing with the distributed cloud.
Wishing you all a happy new year,
Colby Winegar
