Backblaze, Inc. (BLZE) Business

Item 1. Business

Overview

We are a high-performance cloud storage platform for data-intensive use cases in the artificial intelligence (“AI”) era and across a broad range of modern cloud workloads, designed to help customers address complex storage needs by reducing the barriers of lock-in, complexity, and cost. Our mission is to make customers succeed by solving their toughest data storage challenges. We aim to achieve this mission through our purpose-built, web-scale software infrastructure, which is essential to the global data center and compute infrastructure buildout.

We provide cloud services through a purpose-built, web-scale software infrastructure built on commodity hardware. We believe that by offering a cloud storage solution optimized for price-to-performance at scale, engineered for efficiency, and priced predictably, we substantially reduce the cost, complexity and frustration of storing, using, and protecting data, and we empower customers to focus on their core business operations. Customers use us to support their AI workflows, help ensure the cyber-resilience of their organizations, streamline their media workflows, and enable a variety of other data-focused application and information technology (“IT”) needs. Through our blog and culture of transparency, we have built a community of millions of readers and brand advocates. Our direct sales activities, channel and technology partners, and referrals from our community of brand advocates, combined with our highly efficient and self-serve customer acquisition model have allowed us to attract over 500,000 customers as of December 31, 2025, and our direct sales activities have historically supported us in acquiring larger customers, including leading neocloud platforms via our Powered by Backblaze program. As we move up-market, we expect our direct sales activities to increasingly contribute to the acquisition of customers like these. Our customers use our Backblaze Storage Cloud platform across more than 175 countries to store and protect their data with an aggregate of approximately 5 billion gigabytes of data storage under management.

At its founding, Backblaze set out to dramatically simplify the process of storing, using, and protecting data. Over the following years, we focused relentlessly on cutting away the complexity common among traditional cloud vendors’ services and legacy on-premises system vendors. Today, we believe that our solutions are differentiated by their performance and cost efficiency while also delivering reliability and ease of use. Our strategy centers on a focused set of storage use cases and participation in an open cloud ecosystem, which we believe positions us to prioritize opportunities with emerging data-heavy workloads like those with AI model builders and neocloud platforms utilizing our Powered by Backblaze program. Alongside these emerging opportunities, we continue to grow our business and opportunities among the developers of application storage solutions while also continuing to service our foundational use cases including media and entertainment and cyber resilience. Finally, we continue to invest in our self-serve user base, where developers who are experimenting with AI can experiment and grow within our storage platform.

Our Platform and Cloud Services

Backblaze Storage Cloud

The Backblaze Storage Cloud provides the core platform for our cloud services and is designed to deliver high-performance, secure, reliable object storage at exabyte scale. It currently manages over 1 trillion files which are available on demand and is designed to scale efficiently to meet growing enterprise workloads and AI-driven data demands. The key enabler of the Backblaze Storage Cloud is its proprietary global-scale system and software architecture, which manages our global physical infrastructure, including hundreds of thousands of hard drives across multiple data centers.

The web-scale software layer receives, stores, and delivers data for customers across the globe, intelligently allocating storage based on capacity and demand to maintain availability and durability at scale. Managing ever-growing volumes of data across increasingly large hard drives while maintaining durability, availability, and throughput is highly complex. We believe that continued investment in developing performance optimization, efficiency improvements, operational support, and other software innovation enhances our ability to efficiently leverage hardware and scale cost-effectively. Alongside these core processes, this software architecture manages load balancing, caching, deletion, billing, and other essential

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functions for hundreds of thousands of customers. Regular updates to our codebase further strengthen these capabilities and improve the overall performance of our Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform (“IaaS”).

Our vault architecture creates redundancy for the storage of customer data using proprietary and other algorithms. Our software splits each uploaded customer file into several data parts, adds multiple redundant parts, and stores these parts across discrete hard drives in different servers in a data center. As a result, even if a few of the parts are entirely lost or offline, we are able to reconstruct the customer data from the remaining parts for durability and availability. Our globally distributed storage platform also offers customers multi-region geographic choice for their data, including East and West Coast regions in the United States, as well as regions in Canada, and Europe, providing flexibility for different needs including geopolitical considerations, regulatory requirements, and performance optimization.

As our customers’ data needs grow, we seek to continuously and smoothly deploy additional infrastructure and utilize finance leases to align capital deployment with platform scaling requirements. These ongoing investments are designed to support high sustained throughput relative to price, while performing at levels that we believe are at or above competitors’ performance across a range of metrics, including upload and download throughput for multiple file sizes and concurrency profiles. We periodically publish performance testing results and our performance testing methodologies to enhance transparency and enable benchmarking against other cloud storage providers.

Cloud Service Offerings

Through our Backblaze Storage Cloud platform, we deliver two primary services, B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup, which are designed to enable customers to store, use, and protect their data in flexible and cost-effective ways. These services leverage the same core software architecture, allowing us to serve a broad spectrum of customers, from individual users to large enterprises, with consistent performance, security, and reliability.

B2 Cloud Storage

B2 Cloud Storage provides customers with direct access to the Backblaze Storage Cloud platform, enabling them to store, use and protect data for a broad range of use cases. Users can access this platform through industry standard and native application programming interfaces, software development kits, our web interface, or hundreds of third-party integrations. The wide range of options for accessing B2 Cloud Storage allow for broad use, including developers and partners who can integrate storage capabilities into their technology stack or build their own solutions on top of our platform. Customers also strategically tier backups of their core data systems to the Backblaze Storage Cloud platform, including on-premises and virtual machine servers and other high-capacity storage devices.

Businesses are increasingly incorporating B2 Cloud Storage, including our premium high-throughput offering, B2 Overdrive, into AI and machine learning (“ML”) workflows, ensuring data accessibility, scalability, and efficient network performance. From raw data collection and processing, to model training and inference, B2 Cloud Storage is designed to provide a reliable foundation for managing vast datasets, enable seamless data transfer to graphics processing unit (“GPU”) clusters, optimize storage for AI-generated outputs, and provide cost-effective, scalable storage for monitoring and logs. B2 Overdrive is built on the foundation of B2 Cloud Storage, and includes throughput up to 1Tbps, unlimited free egress, and private networking support, designed to give customers the ability to run data-intensive workloads without compromising on performance to keep costs manageable. This flexibility allows customers to leverage best-of-breed compute GPU services without vendor lock-in, and significantly reduces data transfer costs, maximizing resource utilization and minimizing overall expenses.

Customers leverage B2 Cloud Storage for a wide range of other use cases, including public, hybrid and multi-cloud data storage; application development and DevOps; content delivery and edge computing; security and ransomware protection; media management; backup, archive and tape replacement; and Internet of Things (e.g., storing data for surveillance systems, autonomous vehicles, and smart devices). In multi-cloud environments typical of AI and data-intensive workloads, customers frequently move large volumes of data across cloud providers, which can create operational complexity and result in significant data egress fees. B2 Cloud Storage's open platform and standard free egress (up to 3x of data stored) are designed to enable cost-efficient multi-cloud architectures and seamless data orchestration across diverse cloud environments.

B2 Cloud Storage operates as an IaaS model, enabling customers to scale up and down as needed on a pay-as-you-go basis or to purchase capacity or committed contracts for greater predictability.

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Computer Backup

Our Computer Backup cloud service solution backs up laptops, desktops, and external hard drives in a continuous and automated fashion. Whether for home computers or a business’ full fleet of machines, customers can back up a virtually unlimited number of files without size or speed constraints. Computer Backup offers transparent, flat-rate pricing to allow customers to continuously back up data and is delivered as a subscription-based Software-as-a-Service (“SaaS”) model.

Computer Backup includes a lightweight agent that runs locally on each end user’s computer, continuously searching for new and changed files in a manner unobtrusive to the user. When a new or changed file is detected, the altered data is backed up and sent to the Backblaze Storage Cloud. Once there, it is accessible to the end user or business administrator responsible for managing the account. In the event of data loss, customers can restore all or portions of their backed-up data.

Customers leverage Computer Backup for many different use cases, including Mac and PC backup; ransomware protection; theft and loss recovery; data archiving; organization- and managed service provider (“MSP”)-level management; and remote access.

Revenue

Substantially all of our revenue is recurring in nature. We employ a land-and-expand model that drives additional revenue from existing customers. As customers generate, store, and back up more data, their use of our platform increases, creating natural opportunities for revenue expansion. We can further expand our relationships with our customers when they adopt new features and use cases that lead to increased usage of our platform.

For the year ended December 31, 2025, compared to the year ended December 31, 2024, our B2 Cloud Storage revenue grew by 26% and our Computer Backup cloud service revenue grew by 3%.

Go-to-Market and Partnerships

We continue to evolve our go-to-market strategy to focus on high-value customers with enterprise-scale workloads. Our marketing and demand generation teams have reoriented toward account-based marketing, targeted digital campaigns, and industry-specific content. In parallel, we have expanded our direct and channel sales capabilities to support complex procurement cycles and larger multi-year engagements.

Our go-to-market model includes both a sales-assisted motion and a self-service motion. The sales-assisted motion is executed by our internal sales organization, while the self-service motion enables customers to begin using our services quickly through our website and onboarding tools. Together, these motions are designed to allow us to efficiently reach a broad range of customer types and buying preferences.

Sales-Assisted Motion

The sales-assisted motion is supported by the following teams within our sales organization:

•Direct Sales, which focuses on acquiring and expanding relationships with larger customers and strategic accounts, including leading neocloud and AI customers.

•Channel Sales, which manages relationships with resellers and distribution partners who sell our solutions to their customers.

•Alliances, which collaborates with technology partners whose solutions integrate with or complement our platform, enhancing the value we deliver to joint customers.

While our Direct Sales team focuses on acquiring and expanding relationships with larger customers, our Channel Sales and Alliances teams extend our reach by working with our broader partner ecosystem. This ecosystem, including technology partners, channel partners, and MSPs, broadens our distribution network, enhances product integration opportunities, and is designed to drive incremental adoption of our Backblaze Storage Cloud solutions.

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Partner Ecosystem

•Technology Partners. Our platform, together with those of our technology partners, enables software developers to efficiently build applications and provides a cloud storage foundation for partners whose products require reliable, scalable data storage to serve their customers. Partners offering software, hardware, or SaaS solutions to perform backups, synchronize data, manage media, and address other use cases either integrate our Backblaze Storage Cloud as their underlying data storage, or offer it as an optional storage choice to their customers.

•Channel Partners. We sell B2 Cloud Storage to resellers at a discounted rate. Resellers then market and sell B2 Cloud Storage individually or as part of broader solutions to businesses and organizations. This channel provides greater access to markets with specialty needs in the purchasing process, like state and local governments and educational institutions.

•MSPs. Our platform enables MSP partners to store data for backups, archives, hybrid cloud setups, ransomware protection, and other data management use cases. MSPs deliver critical IT solutions for mid-market organizations who often lack the resources to manage these workloads internally. We believe these providers choose Backblaze for the breadth of our platform support, competitive pricing that strengthens their own margin profiles, and ease of use that simplifies service delivery across diverse client environments.

Our white-label Powered By Backblaze program enables third-party organizations to integrate our cloud storage into their products and offer it directly to their customers under their own brand while owning the customer relationship. This program expands our reach into new customer segments and markets and creates shared growth opportunities with our partners.

Customers

Our customer base includes individuals, developers, MSPs, small and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises across industries including media, AI innovators, creative agencies, academic institutions, government agencies, research institutes, and gaming companies. As of December 31, 2025, we had over 500,000 customers in over 175 countries, including approximately 400,000 customers using our Computer Backup cloud services solution and approximately 120,000 customers using our B2 Cloud Storage solution (approximately 20,000 customers use both our B2 Cloud Storage and Computer Backup solutions). Our customer base is highly diversified, with no single customer accounting for more than 10% of our total revenue in 2025 or 2024.

The markets addressed by our platform include Public Cloud IaaS storage. According to International Data Corporation forecasts, the worldwide market for Public Cloud IaaS Storage is expected to grow to $118 billion by 2028.

Sales and Marketing

Our sales and marketing strategy is designed to drive awareness, adoption, and expansion across both self-serve and direct sales motions by aligning our go-to-market efforts with how developers and businesses increasingly discover and adopt cloud infrastructure. We are investing in a number of initiatives that reduce friction for developers building businesses with AI- and other data-intensive workloads, while reinforcing our positioning as a high-performance, cost-effective, open cloud storage provider. These efforts are intended to generate qualified demand, support customer acquisition via an account-based marketing approach, and strengthen our presence within key ecosystems, allowing us to effectively go to market with customers ranging from fast moving startups to established businesses with complex procurement cycles and larger multi-year engagements. Key initiatives of this strategy include creating opportunities for frictionless AI adoption through open source ecosystems, expansion of our developer relations efforts, and the launch of Flamethrower, a startup program designed to provide early-stage companies with product credits, technical support, and ecosystem partnerships to drive early adoption and long-term customer growth.

Prospective customers find us through multiple channels, including our website, partner ecosystem, and community engagement. We leverage both online and offline marketing channels such as blogs, events and trade shows, seminars and webinars, whitepapers, case studies, search engines, advertising and email marketing. We also attend and sponsor industry events and are launching digital advertising campaigns to further extend our reach. In addition to generating customers, our content generation efforts have contributed to building a community of thousands of partners.

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Research and Development

Our R&D investments are focused on building an exabyte-scale storage platform that supports modern, data-intensive use cases, including AI training, analytics, and high-performance computing. In 2025, we launched several new features that enhance performance, enterprise administration, and security, such as B2 Overdrive, an updated enterprise web console, Bucket Access Logs, AI-powered Anomaly Alerts, Multi-Bucket Application Keys, support for S3 API lifecycle rules and checksums, and Legal Hold for Computer Backup.

We continue to invest in optimizing our global storage architecture for scale and throughput, ensuring the Backblaze Storage Cloud remains performant and cost-efficient as customer data footprints and workloads expand. To support higher performance and more complex use cases, we delivered platform enhancements, including upgrading our network with AI-ready 400G-capable links, optimizing our backend for faster uploads and downloads, expanding capacity and efficiency across regions, and instituting mandatory multi-factor authentication to improve account security.

Competition

We compete primarily on the efficiency of our platform, which enables us to deliver high-performance, enterprise-grade cloud storage at a meaningfully lower cost than traditional hyperscale providers. Our proprietary infrastructure design and software-driven architecture create operating efficiencies that we pass directly to customers through simple and transparent pricing. This combination of performance, predictability, and affordability appeals to both enterprise and AI-driven organizations that require scalable, reliable data storage.

In addition to price, we differentiate through ease of use, interoperability, and an open cloud ecosystem that integrates with a broad range of technology partners and multi-cloud environments. Our growing network of MSPs, channel partners, and technology integrations extends our reach into enterprise and mid-market segments, providing customers flexible procurement and deployment options. This efficiency-driven affordability positions Backblaze as a distinct alternative for organizations scaling workloads such as AI/ML training, media production, and data resilience.

Intellectual Property

Our success depends in part on our ability to obtain and maintain intellectual property protection for our technology platform and cloud services, to defend and enforce our intellectual property rights, to preserve the confidentiality of our trade secrets, and to operate without infringing, misappropriating, or otherwise violating the intellectual property rights of others. While we do not currently own any patents, we have three pending patent applications.

We protect our intellectual property through a combination of trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, and domain names. In addition, we control access to our proprietary technology by entering into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and contractors, and confidentiality agreements with third parties, such as service providers, vendors, individuals, and entities that may be exploring a business relationship with us. We own the following registered trademarks: “Backblaze,” “B2,” “Break Free,” “Blaze Forward” and the Backblaze logo. We also have pending trademark applications.

Policing unauthorized use of our technology and intellectual property rights is challenging. Despite our efforts, unauthorized parties may attempt to copy or otherwise use our technology to develop applications with the same functionality as our offerings, and the measures we take to protect and preserve our trade secrets may be inadequate, and we may not have adequate remedies for violations of such measures. Furthermore, our trade secrets may become known or be independently discovered by competitors.

We may also be subject to third-party infringement claims from our competitors or non-practicing entities, some of which may have greater resources than we have. For more information regarding risks related to our intellectual property, see “Risk Factors—Risks Related to Intellectual Property.”

Employees and Human Capital

As of December 31, 2025, we had approximately 320 full-time employees. Our workforce is predominantly remote, excluding certain employees, such as operational personnel. No employees are represented by a labor union with respect to his or her employment by us. A significant number of our employees are either software engineers that develop and

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improve the software that runs our Backblaze Storage Cloud or operations employees that specialize in network operations, site reliability engineering, technical operations, and supply chain, which operate our software and systems to deliver our infrastructure as a service and our cloud services.

Backblaze’s culture is a core strength, and we believe our employees are fundamental to our success. We emphasize inclusion, collaboration, and transparency, recognizing that diverse perspectives, skills, talents, backgrounds, cultures and circumstances strengthen our ability to innovate and serve a broad array of customers. As our business evolves toward enterprise and AI-driven markets, we adopt an AI-first model for employees to strengthen productivity, improve customer outcomes, and support scalable growth.

Facilities

We lease data center spaces in California; Arizona; Virginia; Toronto, Canada; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. These facilities support our global cloud infrastructure and are scalable to meet expected capacity needs.

Corporate Information

We were incorporated in Delaware in 2007 under the name Backblaze, Inc. We completed our initial public offering in November 2021 and our Class A common stock is listed on The Nasdaq Global Market under the symbol “BLZE.” Our principal executive offices are located at 2261 Market Street STE 81006, San Francisco, CA 94114 and our telephone number is (650) 352-3738. Our website address is www.backblaze.com.

Available Information

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or the SEC. Such reports and other information filed or furnished by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at https://ir.backblaze.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are available on the SEC’s website. The SEC maintains a website that contains reports and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. The information contained on the websites referenced in this Annual Report on Form 10-K is not incorporated by reference into this filing. Further, our references to website URLs are intended to be inactive textual references only.