Cloud storage company Wasabi has raised $70 million in new funding, SiliconANGLE reported on Jan. 16 local time.

In the round, Wasabi was valued at $1.8 billion.

Wasabi said it will use the funds to respond to rising demand for storage optimized for AI workloads. David Friend, Wasabi's chief executive, said, "This funding reflects interest from companies and AI developers looking for an alternative to hyperscalers."

Wasabi is expanding from traditional hard disk-based storage into storage that supports high-performance AI training and inference. Pure Storage's participation in the round also aligns with that strategy. Since its founding in 2017, Wasabi has offered its fixed-price Hot Cloud Storage and removed data egress fees, securing competitiveness versus existing hyperscalers.

As storage costs have become more important in the AI infrastructure market, Wasabi launched NVMe-based storage for AI and machine learning training. It also added a feature that generates metadata tags using AI.

In December last year, it also introduced Covert Copy, a backup feature that cannot be accessed without multi-user authentication, as part of efforts to block ransomware and internal threats.

Michael Bayer, Wasabi's chief financial officer, said, "Customer response to the security features is positive, and AI is rapidly changing the storage market."