LEARN / FILE 02
02. Company context: Backblaze in 2026
Know the company well enough to answer “will you be around?” in one breath.
One-breath answer
“Backblaze is a public company, Nasdaq BLZE, founded 2007, profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis at a 30 percent margin last quarter, with $177 million ARR growing 21 percent, B2 growing 34 percent, and a $335 million multi-exabyte contract with CoreWeave signed in June 2026.”
Snapshot (sources in 23-sources.md)
| Fact | Value | Source / date |
|---|---|---|
| Ticker | Nasdaq: BLZE | ir.backblaze.com |
| Founded | 2007, Palo Alto apartment | Backblaze blog author bio, CoreWeave post |
| CEO | Gleb Budman, co-founder, CEO since 2007, Chair since Jan 2021 | backblaze.com/company/about |
| CFO | Marc Suidan (since 2024) | about page |
| CRO | Anuj Kumar (since Apr 13 2026), ex NetApp cloud, SUSE, HUMAN Security | IR press release |
| CTO | Dan Spraggins | Investor Day 2026 transcript |
| B2 customers | 100,000+ | backblaze.com/cloud-storage |
| Total customers | 500,000 in 175+ countries | backblaze.com sales pages |
| Data under management | “over an exabyte” | CoreWeave announcement bio |
| Q2 2026 revenue | $42.7M, +18% YoY | Q2 2026 results, Aug 3 2026 |
| B2 revenue Q2 2026 | $26.6M, +34%, 62% of revenue | same |
| Computer Backup Q2 2026 | $16.1M, -2% | same |
| ARR | $177.3M, +21% | same |
| Adj. EBITDA | $12.8M, 30% margin | same |
| FY2026 guidance | $172M to $174M | same |
| Q3 2026 results | scheduled Nov 2, 2026 | company.md notes [verify date on IR site] |
Strategy in plain words
- From backup company to storage layer for AI. The home page now reads “The object storage layer for AI and data-intensive workloads.” Expect every enterprise conversation to ask “what is your AI story?” even when the workload is backup.
- Upmarket motion. New CRO with a NetApp cloud background, a pilot of Solutions Engineers, and a plan for roughly 60 more GTM hires (recruiter note, [unverified publicly]). Guidance excludes deals over $500K, which makes large deals pure upside. This is where SEs matter.
- Neocloud channel. B2 Neo launched Feb 2026. Backblaze says 25 percent of its data transfer goes to neoclouds, not hyperscalers (B2 Neo page video title). CoreWeave deal: five and seven year order forms, ~$335M TCV, multi-exabyte, B2 capacity in Backblaze DCs plus managed storage inside CoreWeave DCs, powering HDD tiers behind CoreWeave’s LOTA cache with no code changes for CoreWeave customers.
- Flash plus capacity, not flash versus capacity. Backblaze positions under VAST and WEKA (WEKA is a partner; Hume AI case study lists WEKA). Blog headline Sep 24 2026: “Why the Best AI Clouds Don’t Run on Flash Alone.”
- Agent-era tooling. B2 MCP Server (open source, Sep 8 2026), a Claude skill, Pixeltable, CVAT, MLflow-style artifact store guides.
Recent news an SE should be able to mention (last 90 days)
| Date (2026) | Item |
|---|---|
| Aug 3 | Q2 beat, FY guidance raised to $172M to $174M |
| Aug 27 | SSE-B2 default encryption announced for new uploads, live Sep 14 |
| Sep 8 | Backblaze B2 MCP Server released, open source, 40 tools |
| Sep 10 | Suite Studios integration: mount B2 as a high-performance drive |
| Sep 24 | Blog: “Why the Best AI Clouds Don’t Run on Flash Alone” |
| Sep 29 | Q2 2026 Drive Stats: quarterly AFR 1.73% (up from 1.24%), 350K+ drives, 20TB+ drives are 25%+ of fleet |
| Oct 1 | New Jamf deployment options for Business Computer Backup |
Drive Stats: the credibility asset
Backblaze has published hard drive failure data quarterly for over a decade. It is free, it is cited by the whole industry, and it proves one thing to a buyer: this company operates hundreds of thousands of drives and tells the truth about them, even when the number goes up (Q2 2026 AFR rose to 1.73 percent). Use it as a trust signal, not as a durability claim. Durability comes from erasure coding, not low AFR.
Why this matters at the whiteboard
- “Will you be around?” Public, adj. EBITDA positive, multi-year contracted demand.
- “Can you handle our scale?” Exabyte operator; CoreWeave multi-exabyte; Decart 0 to 16 PB in 90 days.
- “Are you just a backup company?” B2 is 62 percent of revenue and the growth engine.