Backblaze Smashes Q2 2026 Expectations with Record Revenue and AI-Fueled Growth
Backblaze, a leading cloud storage provider, has reported an impressive second quarter of 2026, exceeding expectations with record revenue and accelerated growth in its B2 business. In a conference call on August 3rd, CEO Gleb Budman highlighted the company's achievements, citing broad momentum across the business.
The company's revenue came in at $42.7 million, $2.5 million above the high end of its guidance range. Adjusted EBITDA margin was 30%, a staggering 700 basis points above the high end of its guidance range. B2 growth accelerated to 34% year over year, demonstrating the effectiveness of Backblaze's strategy.
One notable achievement was the signing of the largest contract in Backblaze's history, a $335 million multi-year agreement with CoreWeave. This deal underscores the company's ability to secure large-scale contracts and its growing reputation as a trusted provider of cloud storage solutions.
Backblaze also continued to move upmarket, ending the quarter with 235 customers contributing more than $50,000 each in ARR, up 57% year over year. The ARR from this cohort grew 67% year over year, indicating a strong track record of customer retention and expansion.
The company's AI strategy is yielding impressive results, with numerous AI companies signing on, including a leading frontier model developer. Backblaze has also introduced the ability to run its cloud storage in customer-owned data centers, supporting regional and sovereign workloads. This move reflects the growing demand for customized solutions that cater to specific business needs.
In an effort to understand the company's AI strategy, consider this: every training data set, checkpoint, inference output, and GenAI asset must be stored and used. Customers consistently tell Backblaze they have three essential needs - the ability to scale with fast-growing data, architectural freedom to use their cloud of choice, and storage performance that optimizes their AI workloads.
Backblaze's unique approach addresses these needs by providing a more complete storage stack, combining flash-based high-performance storage with hard drive-based capacity storage. This strategy has proven effective in attracting customers from other cloud storage providers like NeoClouds, which initially focused on GPUs as a service but recognized the need for integrated storage solutions.
With five exabytes of storage and almost two decades of technical optimization, Backblaze has established itself as a leader in efficient hard drive-based capacity storage. The company's commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction is clear in its dedication to providing affordable and scalable cloud storage solutions that meet the evolving needs of businesses.
