Backblaze built its own storage servers, red metal boxes it called Storage Pods, and then published the designs for anyone to copy. It also published the failure rates of every hard drive it ran, a report engineers read like box scores. The cheap hardware let it sell online backup and cloud storage for a fraction of what Amazon charged. When Backblaze went public in November 2021, it was a small company in a market ruled by giants.

Five Founders, No Big Checks

Gleb Budman, Brian Wilson, Casey Jones, Tim Nufire, and Damon Uyeda founded Backblaze in 2007. They started with unlimited backup for a flat monthly price per computer. To make that price work, they designed their own low-cost servers. The company grew for years on little outside funding. Later it added B2, a cloud storage service for developers and businesses, and B2 became its main growth engine.

Storage for the AI Boom

Backblaze priced at $16 a share and began trading on the Nasdaq as BLZE on November 11, 2021, raising $100 million. The stock spent years below its offering price. Then AI companies needed huge amounts of storage. In June 2026 Backblaze signed a five-year, $335 million storage deal with CoreWeave, and it still trades on the Nasdaq as BLZE.

Cover: The Prairie on Fire, Alvan Fisher. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a prairie fire (the blaze).