2023 Results: Growth, Reliability & Innovation

At this time last year I wrote about how a great team, a passion for customer success, and an unrelenting focus on the quality of our product translated into exceptional 2022 results for Nasuni. It is a relatively simple formula, and it continued to work in 2023. As shared in a recent press release, Nasuni continued our successes selling into the enterprise and grew new customer bookings by 46% and, after surpassing the $100M annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone in 2022, we again increased our ARR by 30% in 2023.

We continue to gain momentum in the market with consistent year-over-year growth in ARR, averaging 30% per year over the past five years. I am also very proud that Nasuni in 2023, further strengthening our balance sheet. So, despite a very challenging economic climate that has forced many technology companies to reduce their growth rates, cut spending and lay off employees, Nasuni continued our growth and became cash flow positive, all while actually expanding our employee base from the prior year to over 500. Build a great team, maintain a passion for customer success and an unrelenting focus on product quality. It works.

Looking ahead, we are perfectly positioned to continue growing because the needs of the market align with the strengths of our technology and our company. Gartner has said the hybrid cloud storage market is the future, and as enterprise IT leaders across industries work to manage costs, provide outstanding data protection, and accelerate AI innovation, Nasuni’s platform has emerged as the long-term choice. Enterprises can leverage Nasuni to reduce expenses, guard against ransomware, and make their organization AI-ready with a single proven platform.

At the same time, we continue to deliver world-class customer support. The team achieved 98% gross revenue retention rates and a 118% net revenue retention rate in 2023. And we are building a very high-quality customer base. Last year, Nasuni added more than 120 new large enterprise customers across all verticals, including Patagonia, Tommy Bahama, Aedas, Autodesk, and others. We closed the first 8-figure customer contract for the Nasuni File Data Platform and achieved significant year-over-year growth of terabytes in cloud capacity. In short, we have a very healthy business with exciting long-term prospects.

Innovation and AI

The importance of our commitment to innovation is reflected in these results. We anticipated the challenges IT would face in 2023 and advanced the solutions to match. The original value proposition of our technology — delivering the unlimited and cost-effective capacity of cloud object storage, fast local access, and built-in data protection in one solution — continues to drive business. Organizations want a more efficient and cost-effective way to store and protect their unstructured data. Yet 2023 proved that Nasuni’s platform design, our focus on quality, and the phenomenal group of people we’ve brought together are equally important engines behind our growth.

The platform means we can offer organizations increasingly advanced capabilities as their needs evolve. Our Ransomware Protection add-on service, for example, boasted a 71% attach rate on new customer sales, and we are very well positioned to capitalize on the AI and data intelligence revolutions by making it easier for organizations to leverage AI by consolidating all their data in one cloud platform, retaining permissions and security and exposing this data to best-in-class AI capabilities.

Our business wouldn’t be the same without our partners. In 2023, we expanded our relationship with Presidio, launched a new partnership with energy solutions provider Cegal (spurred by the 235% growth in our energy sector business), and further strengthened our ties with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Achieving our goals, demands hard work, passion, and execution from every single person at Nasuni. That includes the experts who design, plan, and build the right products at the right time. The engineers who ensure these products meet and even exceed our quality standards before and after they are released. The sales and marketing teams who build awareness and help IT leaders across industries see the value of Nasuni. Our incredible professional services and customer success leaders who onboard and guide enterprises through their Nasuni journey. The finance teams who manage our numbers and steer us toward our goals and the people who see to it that we attract and retain the best talent in the industry. Additionally, in 2023, we appointed Pete Agresta as our new Chief Revenue Officer, welcomed Asim Zaheer as our new Chief Marketing Officer, and promoted Jim Liddle to lead the development and implementation of our data intelligence and AI work.

All of which brings us to this year. We establish very challenging goals and achieve them year after year because of our people and their commitment to the quality of our product and our mission as a company. While we’re all proud of our 2023 results and our extended five-year run of growth, this is only the beginning. We’re on to 2024 and beyond!