| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Enterprise software Object storage |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Headquarters | San Mateo, California, U.S. |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Michael Tso (CEO) |
| Products | HyperStore HyperStore File Services HyperIQ |
| Services | Object storage Hybrid cloud storage |
| Website | cloudian |
Cloudian is an object storage platform company based in San Mateo, California, founded in 2011. [1] It develops software for object and cloud storage. [2] [3] [4]
In 2001, Michael Tso formed a company called Gemini Mobile Technologies, [5] together with other MIT alumni, including Joseph Norton. [5] Tso had been an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1990s where he learned about parallel computing from professors Bill Dally and Greg Papadopoulos. [5] He studied as a graduate student at MIT under David D. Clark. [5] Gemini Mobile Technologies was later relaunched in 2011. [6] [ failed verification ]
Cloudian was co-founded out of Gemini Mobile Technologies by Michael Tso and Hiroshi Ohta in 2012. [5] The new company had an increased focus on distributed computing and distributed storage. [5]
In 2014 TechCrunch reported that Cloudian had raised $24 million from investors that included Intel and the Innovation Corporate Network of Japan. [7] In March 2018, Cloudian acquired Infinity Storage, an Italian software company. [8] Later that year TechCrunch reported a $94 million investment in Cloudian from companies that included Goldman Sachs. [9] [10] In June 2024 it received an additional $60 million investment.[ citation needed ]
Cloudian products include HyperStore, a software defined storage alternative to cloud-based services [11] [12] built to run on commodity hardware. It is compatible with Amazon Web Services's S3 service. [13] In February 2024, the company released HyperStore version 8 unifying its object and file data products. [13] In 2024 Cloudian collaborated with Nvidia to provide functionality between HyperStore's object storage and Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs). [14] [15]
Cloudian released HyperIQ in 2020, a monitoring system for storage performance and usage. [16] HyperIQ was updated in 2021 to support management of multiple storage clusters. [17] In 2022, HyperBalance was released, providing a load balancer for S3 traffic.
Cloudian holds U.S. patents relating to hybrid cloud, object storage, and hierarchical data management. [18]
In July 2025, Cloudian announced that it had extended its object storage system with a vector database, with the idea of reducing data movement for artificial intelligence workloads (in particular, between storage and GPUs). [5]
Organizations with Cloudian deployments include PostFinance, [4] Rabobank, [19] and Vox Media. [20] Its HyperStore system has been used by NEC and Osaka University for high-performance computing applications. [6] In July 2023, the United States National Library of Medicine (operating under the National Institutes of Health) awarded a five-year contract for Cloudian HyperStore systems and subscriptions. [21] Cloudian partnered with VMware in 2024.[ citation needed ]
Cloudian has partnered with hardware manufacturers and cloud service providers including Amazon Web Services, Lenovo, and Supermicro. [22] [23] According to MIT News, Cloudian was working with about 1,000 companies as of August 2025 [update] . [5]
Cloudian has received both positive and negative evaluations from independent parties. Cloudian was recognized by Gartner with a "Customer's Choice" award in 2022 for distributed file systems and object storage, its third year in a row of receiving the award. [24] However, the company was dropped by Gartner's comparison in October 2024, due to not meeting the inclusion criteria of "a single platform for file and object workloads." [25] Prior to being dropped, Cloudian had been categorized as a "Challenger" in Gartner's "Gartner Magic Quadrant", behind companies such as NetApp, VAST Data, Hitachi Vantara, and Huawei as well as behind "leaders" such as IBM, Dell Technologies, Pure Storage, Scality, and Qumulo. [25]
Cloudian has been evaluated as an object storage vendor by Gigaom, [26] Coladgo Research, [27] and Gartner. [24] In 2020, CRN magazine recognized Cloudian among one to watch in its software-defined storage review. [28]