The Generative AI Revolution Triggers a Surge in Storage Investments
The generative AI revolution has triggered a surge in storage investments, as companies look to stockpile huge amounts of unstructured data to feed their AI strategies. One of the beneficiaries of this explosion of big data is object storage vendor MinIO, which today announced that its annual recurring revenue (ARR) has surged by 149% over the past two years.
MinIO’s Journey to Success
MinIO has come a long way since its start a decade ago as a developer of a small, fast, bare-bones S3-compatbile object store that nobody had heard of. When the open source MinIO object store went GA in 2017, co-founder and co-CEO AB Periasamy talked about "solving storage" as a stepping stone to bigger things, like building powerful AI capabilities directly into data stores.
The Rise of AI Store and promptObject API
It sounded like a long shot at the time, but eight years later, those Periasamy claims seem more achievable than ever. Building AI directly into storage, which Periasamy in 2017 dubbed X-Ray, came to fruition in a way with last year’s launch of AI Store and its new promptObject API, which allows users to "talk" to unstructured data in a direct manner, using natural language prompts.
Unstructured Data: The Fuel for AI
Unstructured data, the fuel for AI, is growing fast (Source: IDC). Fast forward to 2025, and both MinIO’s business and the open source project are humming. To get an idea on where the company is now and where it’s going, we asked a few questions of Garima Kapoor, who is a co-founder of MinIO and who, since February 2024, holds the title of co-CEO along with Periasamy.
MinIO’s Growth Story
"We closed multiple 8-figure, exabyte+ level deals in 2024," Kapoor tells BigDATAwire via email. "We now support hundreds of customers across the globe with data footprints ranging from a couple of hundred petabytes to double-digit exabytes. While these types of multi-exabyte scale deals used to be an anomaly, unheard of even, it’s becoming a requirement in the AI age and MinIO is currently the only provider comfortable with that scale."
Open Source Growth
The open source MinIO project is used by more than half of the Fortune 500, she says, with more than 6.2M deployments globally. The project boasts more than two billion Docker pulls and more than 50,000 GitHub stars. "For context, Apache Spark…only has 40K GitHub stars. Terraform, the open source tool behind HashiCorp’s success, has 44K stars. Python, the most popular programming language in the world, has 65K stars."
Hiring Experienced Executives
The open source growth has been completely organic, as open source is wont to be. But even the deals for the enterprise version of MinIO’s object storage system and AIStore are largely organic and haven’t benefited from the sort of large, polished sales and marketing teams that enterprise software companies typically have. "We have experienced growth very organically over the years, despite not having a traditional enterprise sales team," Kapoor tells us. "Due to recent demand and customer traction, we are now investing in an enterprise sales team to accelerate that growth even further."
Enterprises Join the MinIO Ecosystem
Specifically, MinIO has brought on a couple of experienced hands to guide the company’s transition into enterprise-style sales. It hired Erik Frieberg to be chief marketing officer and Mahesh Patel to be its chief business officer. Frieberg joins MinIO from recent stints at Pantheon Platform, Tetrate, and Solo.io, while Patel comes to the company following executive roles at Druva, RingCentral, and Intematix.
MinIO’s AI-Driven Storage Solution
We’re at a pivotal moment in the AI revolution where companies routinely store an exabyte of data, Kapoor says. That’s the equivalent of nearly 8 million iPhones with 128 GB storage each, she points out. With its AI Store and DataPod reference architecture, MinIO is uniquely positioned to address the exploding storage demands of companies, Kapoor says. Those demands don’t revolve solely around volume, but also factor in storage control and cost, too.
Conclusion
MinIO could always handle exabyte level volumes, Kapoor says. That positions AIStore as the primary growth driver for MinIO over the coming year. "Our new AIStor is purpose-built for modern AI workloads," she says. "Advances, such as promptObject and support for S3 over RDMA, make it easier to extend the power of AI to introduce new functionality across applications without needing to manage separate tools for analysis."
FAQs
Q: What is MinIO’s annual recurring revenue (ARR)?
A: MinIO’s ARR has surged by 149% over the past two years.
Q: What is the open source MinIO project used for?
A: The open source MinIO project is used by more than half of the Fortune 500, with more than 6.2M deployments globally.
Q: What is the purpose of MinIO’s AIStore?
A: AIStore is purpose-built for modern AI workloads, allowing users to "talk" to unstructured data in a direct manner, using natural language prompts.
