Company strengthens go-to-market leadership as AI workloads drive new storage demand
Backblaze, Inc. , the high-performance cloud storage platform for the AI era, announced the appointment of Anuj Kumar as Chief Revenue Officer. Kumar brings more than two decades of experience scaling cloud revenue organizations at enterprise infrastructure companies — most notably driving NetApp’s worldwide cloud business during a period of significant growth. He joins Backblaze as Backblaze advances its go-to-market transformation and AI adoption drives a new phase of infrastructure demand.
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The appointment follows a period of accelerated momentum for Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage business, which grew 26% year over year in 2025, and recently added new offerings targeting neoclouds and AI-native developers, as well as closing its first eight-figure total contract value deal.
“The buildout of AI infrastructure is one of the largest capital replatformings in the history of enterprise technology, and storage underpins it,” said Anuj Kumar, Chief Revenue Officer, Backblaze. “Backblaze has built the right platform for this moment — high performance, S3-compatible, cost-efficient, and free from lock-ins that constrain what customers can do. My job is to make sure the market understands this, and to put in place the GTM motion and partnerships that turn that awareness into durable, compounding revenue.”
Kumar joins as Backblaze pursues two parallel AI growth vectors: one on the supply side and one on the demand side. On the supply side, the company serves neocloud GPU providers—an estimated $14 billion storage opportunity by 2030—as the storage backbone for their platforms. On the demand side, it supports AI-native developers and enterprise users building applications that generate and process large-scale datasets. The company already serves hundreds of AI companies across use cases including model training, audio and video generation, and enterprise AI application development.
“We are in the middle of a fundamental transformation. The opportunity in front of us demands a revenue leader who has done this at scale and in markets directly adjacent to ours,” said Gleb Budman, CEO, Backblaze. “Anuj built one of the most impressive cloud revenue growth stories in the enterprise infrastructure space at NetApp. He understands the neocloud and AI infrastructure ecosystem, he knows how to move upmarket without losing the product-led motion that made us who we are, and he can drive the pipeline discipline and execution rigor this phase of our growth requires.”
Prior to Backblaze, Kumar served as SVP and General Manager for North America at SUSE, and previously as Chief Revenue Officer at HUMAN Security. Earlier in his career, he held senior sales and go-to-market leadership roles at NetApp, VMware, Rackspace, Verisign and Red Hat, living and working across three continents and thirteen cities globally. Kumar holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from BIT Mesra.
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