Tech entrepreneur Anand Babu Periasamy, who sold his cloud computing start-up Gluster to multi-national company Red Hat for $136 million (Rs. 872 crore) has returned to what he does best --- he has launched an open source technology company Minio.
The start-up has also raised Rs. 21 crore ($3.3 million) in a funding round led by marquee investors General Catalyst and Nexus Venture Partners.
Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang’s venture fund AME Cloud Ventures, Index Ventures and top industry executives like Veritas Software founder Mark Leslie, Google Vice-President Brian Stevens and former Rackspace Chief Executive Lanham Napier also participated in this round. Minio, which enables application developers to build their own cloud storage, will use the funds to scale up its operations and hire talent.
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“We are democratising cloud storage and making it open-source. It will be accessible to everyone to store billions and billions of objects,” said Minio Chief Executive Anand Babu Periasamy. A computer engineer graduate from Annamalai University, Periasamy hails from Tharamangalam, a town in Salem district of Tamil Nadu.
He founded Minio along with his Red Hat colleagues Frederick Kautz and Harshavardhana and his wife Garima Kapoor, a PhD in accounting and finance from Nirma University in Ahmedabad.
“Minio founders uniquely understand open source community building, storage and the needs of application developers,” said Deepak Jeevan Kumar, principal at General Catalyst Partners. “They are well positioned to swing for the fences in this $10 billion market opportunity.”
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Andrew Feldman, one of the pioneers of micro servers and Ben Golub, chief executive of tech company Docker has also invested in Minio.
Experts say over the last five years, the internet has seen an unprecedented growth of data driven by photos, videos, documents and machine generated data. Object storage technology which is vastly more scalable than traditional file system storage evolved primarily to address this type of content in the cloud.
Minio aims to democratize cloud storage by building object storage in the open source community. Periasamy said the name Minio stands for minimal object storage and derives from the belief in the philosophy of minimalism. He said to store 80% of the world’s data, users need only 20% of the storage functionality. “As counter intuitive as it seems, scalability and operational ease start with reduction and simplicity.”
The public and private cloud storage market is estimated to grow from $13.57 billion (Rs 87,000 crore) in 2014 to $56.57 billion (Rs 3.6 lakh crore) in 2019 at a compound annual growth rate of 33.1%, according to research firm MarketsAndMarkets
“Minio has the potential to redefine cloud storage, the way we know it,” said Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director at Nexus -- which backed Periasamy’s earlier start-up Gluster. “We are again thrilled to be backing (Minio) from day zero.”
Periasamy founded Gluster in 2005 along with his friend Hitesh Chellani. They worked at California Digital and were part of the team that built the ‘Thunder’ supercomputer for Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Thunder was the second-fastest supercomputer in the world when it was put into production in 2004. Gluster was started inside Chellani’s home. His daughter’s bedroom served as the office and data centre occupied with noisy servers. In 2011, Red Hat acquired Gluster for Rs 872 crore ($136 million) in an all-cash deal.