Data volumes continue to grow exponentially while the wave of AI applications and agents being implemented require huge amounts of data to operate effectively. As part of CRN’s Stellar Startups for 2026, here are six storage technology startups, founded in 2020 or later, that solution providers should be aware of.
Next-Generation Storage Vendors
The total volume of digital data created, captured, copied and consumed reached 173.4 zettabytes in 2025, according to Statista, with estimates that it will reach 220 zettabytes this year.
IT management faces the challenge of effectively storing and managing all this data, which businesses are increasingly seeing as a valuable asset. And the proliferation of AI applications and agents, which require huge amounts of data to run effectively, is also spurring the need for storing and managing high-quality data.
These trends are driving innovation in the data storage space – and much of that is coming from startups with new data storage technologies and concepts.
As part of CRN’s Stellar Startups 2026, here are six startups in the storage technology space (including disaster recovery), founded in 2020 or later, that solution providers should get to know.
The following slides include lightly edited company and product descriptions provided by the startups.
ControlMonkey
Founded: 2022
Headquarters: Wilmington, Del.
Top Executive: Aharon Twizer, CEO
ControlMonkey’s platform helps enterprises back up and recover cloud environments at scale. The platform gives security and cloud teams visibility into what is actually running, brings unmanaged and drifted resources under control, and treats cloud configuration as a recoverable asset.
The ControlMonkey Cyber Resilience Platform provides a number of services including cloud disaster recovery, SaaS configuration disaster recovery, and ransomware backup and recovery. It helps enterprises discover, back up, compare, and recover critical cloud and SaaS configurations across infrastructure, identity, networking, observability, and third-party systems. It is built for security, cloud, and platform engineering teams.
Website: https://controlmonkey.io/
Geyser Data
Founded: 2024
Headquarters: Tustin, Calif.
Top Executive: Nelson Nahum, Co-Founder and CEO
Geyser Data believes cold data should never become trapped, costly, or forgotten. The startup’s Amazon S3-compatible Buckets offerings make long-term archiving simple, predictable, and accessible—powered by enterprise-grade Spectra Logic tape, free from egress and surprise fees, and ready to preserve today’s data for tomorrow’s discoveries, compliance, and AI.
Geyser Data provides Buckets for Cold Data Archiving, a simple Amazon S3-compatible cloud archive service built on enterprise-grade Spectra Logic tape infrastructure. Designed for midmarket and enterprise customers, it supports backup retention, compliance, research, media, analytics, and AI data reuse without egress, retrieval, access, or surprise API fees.
Website: www.geyserdata.com
Leil Storage
Founded: 2022
Headquarters: Tallinn, Estonia
Top Executive: Aleksandr Ragel, CEO
Leil Storage builds software-defined, exabyte-scale storage including LeilFS, the company’s open-source parallel file system, and LeilOS, the commercial platform. Client-side erasure coding eliminates east-west rebuild traffic, while SMR optimization yields approximately 20 percent extra usable capacity and 40 percent longer drive life.
The company’s market focus is on 100PB-plus high-performance computing, research, cloud, media, genomics, and AI infrastructure.
LeilOS provides software-defined storage for exabyte-scale archives and data lakes. It runs on commodity servers with mixed HDD types, client-side erasure coding, near-native throughput, and S3/NFS access.
Website: https://leil.io
Lucidity
Founded: 2021
Headquarters: Bengaluru, India
Top Executive: Nitin Bhadauria, CEO
Lucidity touts its Cloud Storage OS as the one AI platform that can see, optimize, and govern cloud storage. The offering learns how block and object storage behaves, then autonomously right-sizes, re-tiers, and reclaims it across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, acting on live storage with zero downtime and providing savings reaching 70 percent.
The company’s target is mid-to-large enterprises running on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and management personas in IT, CloudOps, FinOps and DevOps. The company sells 100 percent through the channel.
Lucidity’s Cloud Storage OS includes Block modules: Disk AutoScaler, Disk Tiering and Disk Cleanup; and Object modules: Object Mapping, Object Tiering and Object Drift.
Website: https://www.lucidity.cloud/
Slide
Founded: 2025
Headquarters: Westport, Conn.
Top Executive: Austin McChord, Interim CEO
Slide provides a modern business continuity and disaster recovery platform built exclusively for MSPs. It helps partners protect client data, strengthen cyber resilience, and recover quickly from outages, ransomware, and other disruptions. Its clean-sheet architecture combines secure backup, immutable storage, fast recovery, and simplified management for today’s IT environments.
Slide is an always-encrypted BCDR platform built exclusively for MSPs. Its modern architecture combines NVMe-powered local and cloud backup, rapid virtualization and recovery, workflow automation, open API access, scalable storage, and direct-to-engineer support—all designed to help MSPs protect client environments and restore operations faster than legacy platforms.
Website: https://slide.tech/
Xinnor Ltd.
Founded: 2022
Headquarters: Bar Jehuda, Israel
Top Executive: Dmitry Livshits, CEO
Xinnor develops high-performance software-defined storage technologies, including xiRAID and xiNAS, focused on accelerating NVMe-based infrastructure for high-performance computing, AI, enterprise, and research environments. The company helps customers maximize storage performance, reliability, and scalability without relying on traditional hardware RAID limitations.
xiRAID is Xinnor’s high-performance software RAID technology for NVMe storage. It delivers strong data protection, low latency, fast rebuilds, CPU efficiency, and near-native SSD performance. Target markets include HPC, AI, enterprise storage, databases, media production, and other performance-sensitive infrastructure.
Website: https://xinnor.io/
