UltiHash raises $2.5M to make data storage more cost-effective and sustainable

BIG DATA

UltiHash Inc. said today it has closed on a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round, paving the way for the launch of its high-performance data storage software that aims to boost the capacity of existing storage drives and help enterprises achieve a better balance between performance and costs.

Today’s round was led by Inventure, and saw participation from the likes of PreSeedVentures, Tiny VC, Futuristic VC, The Nordic Web and Antti Karjalainen, founder and angel scout for Sequoia Capital. Other, unnamed private investors also took part in the round, the startup said.

The company explained that existing storage hardware forces many companies to compromise between performance and costs, with the most expensive solutions often prohibitively expensive. According to UltiHash, this challenge is especially acute for companies working with hybrid cloud data infrastructures, where data transfer rates and multivendor setups can dramatically increase complexity and cost.

UltiHash wants to strike a better balance, helping companies to store more data without increasing their storage resources. It does this with high-performance object storage software that enables byte-level deduplication independent of data type to any kind of data infrastructure, matching binary fragments per and across even the biggest, exabyte-scale datasets.

The startup reckons its technology can help companies to reduce their storage needs by as much as 50%, helping them to save millions of dollars on unnecessary networking and storage costs. It provides a way for companies to only store and migrate the data they really need, without sacrificing speed.

Essentially, what UltiHash is doing is condensing the data that companies store, so they can get away with using fewer storage resources. That, it said, will help to facilitate the growth of data-driven applications such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, business intelligence, product engineering and more. It helps companies ensure every single byte of their data counts. By doing this, companies can expand their data estates in a more sustainable and cost-effective way.

UltiHash’s software is accessible via an Amazon S3-compatible application programming interface that provides native integration, though it is also compatible with other cloud infrastructures.

The launch of UltiHash’s product comes at a time when such solutions are desperately needed. The company cites International Data Corp.’s 2025 Data Storage report, which forecasts the total amount of data in the world to increase to 175 zettabytes by 2025, growing at an annual rate of 19.2% from 2020.

This is a big concern, not only regarding costs, but also sustainability. UltiHash says that each zettabyte of storage generates annual carbon emissions that are equivalent to that generated by roughly 2 million people. As such, it believes it can make a real impact on the environmental toll of data growth.

According to co-founder and Chief Executive Tom Lüdersdorf, the exponential growth of data is both inevitable and unsustainable. “Resource optimization is the only way forward to manage data growth and continuously use data as the lever to solve challenges,” he said. “In this industry, speed is a must, and we’re here to make hot storage resource-efficient.”

Inventure’s Rebecka Löthman Rydå said people often refer to data as the new oil, and points out that just like oil, it also has a substantial negative impact on the environment. “UltiHash leads a tectonic shift in sustainable data storage with a solution able to eliminate unnecessary data and highly increase efficiency in your data operations,” she added.

Images: UltiHash