MinIO

MinIO, founded in 2014, builds software-defined, exabyte-scale object storage for AI and unstructured data workloads. Its open-source object store, released under the GNU AGPL v3.0 licence, is compatible with the Amazon S3 API and handles datasets from terabytes to exabytes within a single namespace. The company offers commercial subscriptions on top of this technology, positioning itself against proprietary alternatives and emphasising an absence of vendor lock-in.

Its product line spans three tiers: the open-source MinIO software; AIStor, an exabyte-scale object store designed for AI training, inference and analytics; and AIStor Enterprise, a commercial subscription providing enterprise-grade support and capabilities. The technical work sits at the intersection of storage and artificial intelligence, covering software-defined storage, data lakehouse architectures, Apache Iceberg, GPU-accelerated AI infrastructure and cloud-compatible APIs.

Adoption is broad among large enterprises. The company reports that more than half of the Fortune 500 use its software, including all ten of the largest American banks and nine of the ten largest global automakers. Customers are drawn from financial services, automotive, analytics and data warehousing, and enterprise data infrastructure, with deployments ranging from terabyte-scale systems to exabyte-scale estates.

The company was founded by engineers working on a fundamental infrastructure problem and has built a substantial open-source community around its storage software. Its stated emphasis is on speed, simplicity and portability, serving organisations with demanding storage requirements at scale.