Backblaze (BLZE) 20th Annual Needham Technology, Media & Consumer 1x1 Conference summary

Company overview and market positioning

• Provides low-cost, high-performance cloud object storage, focusing on business customers and competing with major cloud providers.

• Evolved from backup-focused origins to support diverse use cases, including media, application storage, and AI workloads.

• Object storage is highlighted as the default for large-scale, unstructured internet data due to its scalability and cost efficiency.

• Offers pricing about 80% lower than traditional providers, with free egress and high upload speeds via patent-pending Shard Stash technology.

• Recently launched B2 Cloud Storage Overdrive for high-throughput, large data set transfers.

Product innovation and customer use cases

• Overdrive addresses demand for rapid, high-volume data movement, especially for AI and analytics customers.

• Platform optimizations enabled Overdrive with minimal additional R&D or capital, leveraging existing infrastructure.

• Example: AI customers collecting and selling large internet data sets benefit from fast, cost-effective storage and egress.

• Shard Stash accelerates uploads for enterprise backup tools, while Overdrive focuses on maximizing throughput for large transfers.

• Storage and networking optimizations allow rapid data movement to GPU providers and multi-cloud environments.

Go-to-market strategy and customer journey

• Multiple channels: self-serve, direct sales, channel, and OEM partnerships.

• Direct sales is the largest revenue contributor, with channel and OEM growing, especially for larger deals.

• Typical sales cycles are about three months, with most contracts being one year, some multi-year.

• 90% gross customer retention and average customer tenure of a decade; B2 net revenue retention at 117%.

• Largest contract to date involved a customer migrating from AWS, starting with a one-year deal and expanding to a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract.