Backblaze: how simple computer backup grew into a cloud storage platform
Backing up a computer should have been easy by 2007. In practice, many people still ignored it because the available options felt expensive, complicated or difficult to maintain.
Backblaze started by attacking that problem rather than trying to build an enormous cloud platform from day one. Its founders wanted an online backup service that ordinary computer users could install, leave running and largely forget about. The company charged a simple monthly price and handled the storage behind the scenes.
Nearly two decades later, that consumer-backup business still exists. Yet the faster-growing side of Backblaze now looks very different. B2 Cloud Storage serves developers, businesses and increasingly data-intensive workloads that need large amounts of object storage.
The shift did not come from abandoning the original idea. Backblaze built the infrastructure needed for backup, then realised customers wanted direct access to the storage underneath it.
Seven founders started with one backup problem
Backblaze traces its beginnings to 2007, when seven co-founders started the business from a one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, California.
Gleb Budman has served as chief executive since the company’s founding and now also chairs its board. The early team had already worked together on previous technology businesses, which meant Backblaze began with an experienced group rather than a single founder trying to assemble a company from scratch.
Their initial target was straightforward: online computer backup.
Instead of making customers decide which folders deserved protection, Backblaze designed its software to back up user data automatically. The service also adopted flat-rate pricing rather than charging consumers according to every gigabyte stored.
Backblaze opened its online backup service to the public in October 2008 after an earlier testing period. The product became the foundation of what the company now calls Computer Backup.
That original service remains part of Backblaze in 2026, even though cloud infrastructure has become the more important growth engine.
Cheap online backup created an expensive storage challenge
Offering unlimited computer backup sounds simple from the customer’s side. Behind the service, Backblaze still needed somewhere to put enormous amounts of data.
Buying conventional storage systems at the required scale would have made the economics much harder. The company instead designed its own storage hardware around relatively inexpensive commodity components.
That work produced the Backblaze Storage Pod.
Rather than keeping the design secret, Backblaze published details of the Storage Pod in 2009. The company shared the hardware design, component list and information needed for technically capable users to build similar systems.
Storage Pods became an important part of Backblaze’s public identity. They also demonstrated that the company saw storage infrastructure as a problem worth engineering itself rather than simply purchasing as a finished appliance.
The design evolved over several generations as Backblaze’s data volumes increased.
By 2010, the company had reached 10 petabytes of customer data. Four years later, the figure had reached 100 petabytes. Backblaze later crossed one exabyte of stored customer information.
Those milestones changed the nature of the business. Backblaze had started with backup software, but operating the service forced it to become highly experienced in storing data at large scale.
Hard-drive statistics became an unexpected Backblaze institution
Running large numbers of hard drives also gave Backblaze access to something many storage buyers rarely see: failure information collected across a substantial drive fleet.
The company began publishing Drive Stats reports using data from drives operating inside its infrastructure.
These reports developed a following well beyond Backblaze customers because they offered real-world information about drive behaviour over long periods. The company has continued publishing quarterly and annual drive statistics covering the hardware in its data centres.
The reports do not prove that a particular drive model will survive in every computer or storage system. Backblaze operates drives under its own workload and environmental conditions, which differ from consumer PCs and other data centres.
Even with that limitation, the reports became one of the company’s best-known contributions to the wider storage community.
More importantly, they reflected the unusual path Backblaze had taken. A company that began by making backup easier had developed enough storage infrastructure to produce meaningful long-term data about the physical drives beneath the service.
Customers wanted the storage without the backup application
The next major step came from a request that Backblaze kept hearing from users.
Customers liked the storage infrastructure behind Computer Backup, but some did not want a backup application. They wanted direct access to cloud storage for their own software and data.
Backblaze eventually turned that demand into B2 Cloud Storage.
The company announced B2 in September 2015 and opened a private beta. A public beta followed in December.
B2 changed the commercial opportunity significantly.
Computer Backup was primarily a finished application. Customers installed the software, and Backblaze handled the backup process.
B2 exposed object storage as a service. Developers and organisations could store, retrieve and manage data directly rather than using Backblaze only through the consumer backup product.
That opened the infrastructure to a much wider range of uses.
Media archives, application data, backups from third-party software, ransomware recovery copies and large datasets could all use the same broader storage platform.
B2 changed what Backblaze could become
Launching B2 did not turn Backblaze into a completely different company overnight. The underlying storage experience had been built through years of operating Computer Backup.
What changed was who could use that infrastructure.
A developer could connect software directly to B2. A business could use it as an off-site storage destination. Organisations could integrate the service with backup, media and data-management tools.
Backblaze gradually expanded B2 with compatibility features, integrations and performance improvements.
Its commercial focus also began shifting toward larger customers.
That shift can now be seen clearly in the company’s financial results. In 2025, B2 Cloud Storage generated $79.9 million of revenue, up 26% from the previous year. Computer Backup produced $65.9 million, growing by a much smaller 3%.
For the first time, the business that grew out of Backblaze’s storage infrastructure had become larger than the original backup product on an annual revenue basis.
Nasdaq brought another change in scale
Backblaze entered the public market in November 2021.
The company priced its initial public offering at $16 per share and sold 6.25 million Class A shares. That represented $100 million in gross proceeds before underwriting costs and other expenses.
Trading began on the Nasdaq Global Market under the ticker BLZE.
Becoming a public company did not alter the basic storage architecture overnight, but it made Backblaze’s economics much more visible.
Revenue, losses, customer numbers, retention and capital spending now appeared in regular financial reports. Investors could see how quickly B2 was growing and compare it directly with Computer Backup.
The public filings also showed the challenge behind running cloud storage. Backblaze needs physical capacity before customers can use it, which means servers, drives, networking equipment and data-centre infrastructure remain important even though customers interact with the service as software.
Cloud storage may feel virtual. The underlying capacity is not.
B2 is now doing most of the growing
Backblaze reported total revenue of $145.8 million for 2025, an increase of 14% from 2024.
The split between its two businesses tells a more interesting story.
B2 Cloud Storage revenue reached $79.9 million, while Computer Backup contributed $65.9 million. Backblaze also reduced its annual net loss from $48.5 million in 2024 to $25.6 million in 2025.
Growth accelerated further during the second quarter of 2026.
Backblaze generated quarterly revenue of $42.7 million, up 18% from the same period a year earlier. B2 revenue climbed 34% to $26.6 million, while Computer Backup revenue slipped 2% to $16.1 million.
B2 annual recurring revenue reached $113.3 million at the end of the quarter, representing 39% year-on-year growth. Computer Backup ARR stood at $64 million and was broadly flat.
The numbers show where Backblaze’s expansion is coming from.
Computer Backup remains a substantial business, but B2 now provides the stronger growth.
AI has created a much larger storage opportunity
Artificial intelligence has added another chapter to the B2 story.
Training and operating AI systems can involve enormous datasets. Text, images, audio and video all require storage before, during and after processing.
The fastest storage does not necessarily need to hold every piece of data at every moment. Large AI environments can use different tiers for information depending on how quickly it needs to be accessed.
Backblaze is positioning B2 as one of those storage layers.
The company has increasingly targeted AI developers and specialised cloud environments with large capacity requirements. It has also developed B2 Neo, a service aimed at providers that want to incorporate scalable storage into their own cloud offerings.
The strategy became far more tangible in June 2026.
Backblaze announced a five-year agreement worth $335 million to supply multi-exabyte storage capacity for parts of CoreWeave’s managed storage infrastructure.
The arrangement represents a major contract for a company that generated $145.8 million in total revenue during all of 2025.
Backblaze still has to deliver the capacity and services covered by the agreement, so the contract should not be confused with revenue already earned. Its significance lies in the scale of the commitment and the type of workload B2 is now being asked to support.
The original backup product still matters
It would be easy to describe Backblaze as a company that left consumer backup behind.
The numbers show otherwise.
Computer Backup generated more than $65 million in 2025 revenue and remained responsible for $64 million of annual recurring revenue at the end of the second quarter of 2026.
Its growth has slowed, but the product continues to serve a large customer base and generate recurring income.
That mature business also helped create the infrastructure knowledge behind B2.
Without years of storing customer backups, Backblaze might never have developed the architecture that later became a standalone cloud-storage product.
The two businesses therefore represent different stages of the same story rather than unrelated product lines.
Computer Backup simplified data protection for end users. B2 opened the underlying storage capability to organisations that wanted to decide for themselves how to use it.
Backblaze has moved upmarket without losing its original idea
Backblaze now serves a very different range of customers from the people who first installed its backup software in 2008.
The company still sells straightforward online backup, but B2 has taken it into developer infrastructure, enterprise data protection, application storage and AI-related workloads.
That expansion has increased the size of individual opportunities.
Backblaze reported that annual recurring revenue from customers spending more than $50,000 a year rose sharply during 2025. Larger contracts continued to become more important during 2026.
Moving upmarket changes the demands on the company.
A consumer backup subscriber may need reliable software and customer support. A large infrastructure customer can require far greater capacity, performance planning, integration and contractual commitments.
Backblaze therefore has to scale its operations alongside the size of the customers it is trying to attract.
Storage is still the thread connecting everything
Backblaze’s story can look like a series of separate pivots: backup, Storage Pods, drive statistics, object storage and now AI infrastructure.
The connection between them is much simpler.
Backblaze has spent almost two decades finding ways to store large quantities of data at a cost customers will accept.
Computer Backup turned that capability into an easy consumer service. Storage Pods helped Backblaze control the economics underneath it. B2 exposed the storage platform directly to developers and businesses. Newer AI workloads are now pushing the company toward much larger datasets and contracts.
The business is considerably more complex than it was in the Palo Alto apartment where the founders started.
Its central problem has barely changed.
People and organisations keep producing more data, and somebody has to store it reliably.
Backblaze built its first business by making that job easier for computer owners. In 2026, it is trying to apply the same principle at an entirely different scale.
