An Italian startup looking to hand businesses back sovereignty over their data, infrastructures and costs has revealed its plans for the UK.
UK investors LocalGlobe and ETF Partners co-led a £10 million investment raise into Cubbit, which launched its platform in the UK earlier this year.
Addressing the boom in data creation, Cubbit allows companies and service providers to build their own geo-distributed S3 cloud storage, avoiding a reliance on hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
It claims to reduce storage costs by up to 80% while minimising carbon footprint as it requires 25-50% less IT resources to run, extending the storage hardware lifespan and reducing electronic waste.
Alessandro Cillario, co-CEO and co-founder, told BusinessCloud that it is expecting “significant growth” in the UK, one of its top three new markets.
“We are in the process of establishing our UK team, which is to be led by UK storage expert Paul Clarke,” he said.
“The UK is a key market for Cubbit’s expansion. The two lead investors in this funding round are from the UK and are very much involved in our growth process.
“The UK and the Nordics markets have the right level of technology maturity to fully embrace the effectiveness of a solution that can support IT organisations in orchestrating their data in a secure, sovereign, and independent way.
“Moreover, the UK market has already deployed edge-data projects and is seeking solutions to better manage the resultant complexity.
“The first goal is to acquire 10 key partners by Q4 2024 to accelerate the adoption of our solution to UK end customers.”
Clarke, who has experience at Zerto, Infinidat and – most recently – Pure Storage, has been appointed sales manager for the UK & Nordics.
Among the new investors joining Cubbit are Verve Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Hydra (holding of Datalogic), Growth Engine, Eurenergia and Moonstone.
Azimut Libera Impresa SGR – Azimut Digitech Fund under the advisory of FNDX, CDP Venture Capital SGR through its Fondo Evoluzione, and Primo Ventures are returning investors. Individual investors include Fabio Fregi, former Italy country manager of Google Cloud, and Joe Zadeh, former VP product at Airbnb.
“We are looking at service providers, telcos and enterprises that are ready to orchestrate their unstructured data with a secure and independent solution that offers the capability to prepare their storage infrastructure for the edge and AI explosion of data creation and management,” continued Cillario.
Stefano Onofri, his co-CEO and co-founder, added: “Having top-tier international VCs invest in Cubbit’s geo-distributed technology is a major endorsement.
“Over the past few years, we have grown massively and closed key partnerships and agreements with international players such as Leonardo, HPE, and Equinix – now it’s time to take our expansion to the next level.”