Redefining Object Storage: MinIO’s Role in Cloud and AI Innovation with Garima Kapoor

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Textron tv. My next guest is Garima Kaur.

Garima is the co-founder and co CEO of min io. That's M-I-N-I-O. We're going to hear about the background of that name and how he came up, I'm sure.

But first, let's welcome Garima to the show. Garima, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to have you here.

Thank you, Alan, for, uh, having me here. Looking forward to the conversation. Absolutely.

So, Garima, before we talk about men io and we're gonna talk about sovereign AI and, and that, but let's take a moment to talk about Garima. Okay. All right.

I don't have to tell you, we don't see a lot of co-CEOs. Yes. We don't see a lot of women CEOs, frankly.

Not enough. Anyway, um, let's hear your story. I'm sure there's a story behind this.

Tell us. Yeah, no, absolutely. And since you mentioned CO CEO, I think for a founder, the only title that matters is always the founder and the creator and builder.

Other titles, you know, come and go. If you look at, uh, when I started, uh, me io I was in a COO role, CFO role, and that of course, now, uh, I'm the CEO of the company. So the titles evolve, but as a founder, the passion and the work that you do still remains very fluid across our organization.

So yeah, I agree with you. Give us your background. How did you come to found, uh, eo?

It is quite interesting because my background is, uh, in finance and economics, nothing to do with tech. I was not interested in Tech till I landed in Valley. And, uh, I think once you're in Silicon Valley, you kind of get plugged into that entire system of startups and VCs and get immersed in the tech world itself.

And that is where, uh, once I started engaging more with startups, I was, um, an investor earlier. So that was my first foray into startups. And, um, I realized that it's much more easier to advise than to do things yourself.

So, so Yes, this is true. So as I was advising the startups, I'm like, I need to do something of my own. I need to build something of my own.

So it was just a very simple desire that I had within myself, and that became a thing of its own. And I think the timing of how everything came together was quite, uh, interesting because as I was thinking about starting my own company and, uh, finding the problem that was exciting for, uh, me and my co-founders to go after, I think one thing that, you know, no matter what exploration, so searching that goes in the early phases, we did, it always came to the data problem. And it was like, this is a problem that is going to be relevant not only now, but 10, 20, 30 years from now.

And not only relevant, but grow exponentially. So we just started with that simple premise that we wanted to go after the data. And then in data, at a very high level, what do you do?

You either draw insights on data, which is on the compute part, or you store it at scale. So we started with the, the foundation that if we become the store of choice for data at scale than anything that we build on top of it to understand the kind of data, the structure of the data that sits on our platform, it'll only lead to more value to our customers or to more value, uh, uh, for overall for our organization. So I think that is the simple premise that we started.

And, uh, AWS had already educated the industry that, uh, object store as a technology is the right place to bring all your data to. AWS strategy was that, uh, bring all your data to AWS and we'll take care of it. Our strategy was that we'll go to all the places where data is getting generated.

So we just had a different strategy, but in terms of technology, scale, performance metrics, all the good stuff, uh, uh, we are a replacement for AWS S3. Excellent. And look, it, it's amazing.

I remember when they launched S3 to tell you the truth. And, uh, you know, there's always, and I'm not here to knock AWS at all, but you know, a lot of times it's the 80% of the functionality or 20% of the price type of offering, right. And it, it's like that big box store.

Yeah, sure, you can go to the big box store and buy a lot of things, but sometimes you want to go to the specialty stores when you want to get the Yeah. Better quality, you know, and, um, I I, I get that whole way of looking at it. So tell us the min io story.

First of all, how'd you come up with the name? So Minai be so storage industry, if you see overall, you know, uh, is filled with the players that, uh, thrive on complexity to say the least. And, uh, for us, we really believe that anything that needs to scale or work at scale needs to be simple, needs to just do the job that it is meant to do without the complexity and overbearing features on it.

So that is where, uh, we came up with the name. Uh, it just, it's the core philosophy of the company. Minimalism, do everything that is needed to the perfection, but do not, uh, complex the system overall.

So I, that is where it comes. And then, you know, minimalist io, so it all added up together and then it's a 4, 4, 5 letter word, so you know, you cannot go wrong. So Yeah, no, absolutely fascinating.

Yeah. You don't mind me asking, when, when did you find found? MIN io?

We incorporated in November of, uh, 2014, but the real work started in 2015 sometime, so yeah. Yeah, it's tier at Techstrong actually also incorporated, I think in November of 13. com first published in, uh, April, Mar, April, March, or April, I forget now, of 2014, so Right, right around when, when you started Min io.

Interesting. Um, and you know, so it's been 10 years and, and 10 years is a great run, you know, at a startup. It is.

What's changed, what, you know, when you look back 10 years ago, what was the idea behind MIN io, what you guys have done, and now you're sitting here, it's 2025. Yeah. Almost 2026 I guess, right?

We're closer to 2026 than we are Yeah, I think in January. Yeah. I think so much has changed in the way the industry has operated.

I think before the interview we were talking about, you know, how AI is just accelerating and compressing the entire timeline for, uh, everyone. But, uh, to give you a brief history, right? How fast the things have evolved when we started, right, the object store was kind of treated as, you know, the slow and deep tier for your data.

You know, just put the data once, never touch it. And if you see the cloud, which is AWS Azure, Google Cloud, the public cloud providers, they are built on object store. All their services natively run on object store.

So object store within cloud was never considered as the third tier storage. It was always considered as the main or the primary tier for storage to address that workload. But in the enterprise, the perception was of Object store was in terms of, you know, cheap and deep kind of a tier.

So I think because the cloud right around the time we started and the cloud was rising, I think that perception kind of shifted quite a bit. And there was a requirement in terms of the object tool that can deliver on the performance that is required by data analytics, workloads, query, query workloads. And now of course, with the AI workloads now, uh, you know, with the AI coming to forefront, I think it is going through one more shift.

You know, three, four years back, the CIOs were ques getting questioned, what is your cloud strategy? Now everyone is questioning them. What is your AI strategy?

And I think AI is decoupling some of the cloud strategy with the tech strategy again, in terms of what is the tech stack that a lot of the enterprises want to have when they think about, uh, AI stack overall. And I think that AI stack is defining what gets driven from the infrastructure standpoint as compared to, you know, the cloud first strategy that okay, we go to AWS and see what services we can get from there. So that shift has happened phenomenally and, uh, for min io perspective, we couldn't have, uh, asked for better timing.

I think it's phenomenal time for all of us to be just part of the industry and part of the Valley right now, because things are changing so fast and bulk of the AI training workloads happen on Object store. If you see, you know, cloud or if you see open ai, it, you know, you name it Mistral, they're all run on object store. And, uh, Minaya has a very unique, uh, positioning and a play there when it comes to scale and performance to what these, uh, workloads require.

So yeah. Couldn't be more happier. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Um, you know, it's interesting. We, uh, there's always usually a pendulum that swings.

It is right, that goes from, uh, one throat to choke to best of breed from big, big box to boutique, from, you know, infinitely scalable to infinitely hands-on, right? And, and bespoke, if you will. Um, but yet this AI thing, I, I agree with you.

It, it's just been the, the timelines, how everything is being compressed and done. I worry, I worry are we just going too fast and overlooking or putting, look, the, the tech industry is a magic bullet industry, right? We always go after the next magic bullet, the next shiny trinket.

Yeah. And AI is the biggest shiniest trinket that's come down the bike in a long time. Um, but we are decoupling.

I, I, I see that as well. I think we're also seeing an era where, look, public cloud is well entrenched. It's not going away.

It's not even shrinking. It continues to grow. But our, I don't want to say needs our thirst, our addiction even, let's call it an addiction to more data center, to more storage, to more power, yeah.

To more mips to more GPUs is Yeah. Is is almost outstripping our, I, you know, I, I read it, we did a report on Textron gang yesterday. 7% vacancy rate in data centers.

I can imagine throughout The us I can imagine Of the data centers currently under construction, and there's a lot of them, 75% of the space in those data centers are already pre-salt. That's amazing. Right.

Energy for the data centers. Yep. Cooling for the data centers.

Yes. And they're building data centers. Yeah.

You know, in Phoenix, Arizona where they don't have water to Cool. Yes. This stuff with, right.

But the, the data centers are the size of Manhattan. Yes. I mean, it, it's, this whole thing is just, wow.

Um, one of the reasons, of course, so that they're building all these data centers in the US is this move towards as, as it's becoming known Sovereign ai, sovereign cloud. Yeah. Sovereign tech.

Yeah. You know, where we wanna, you know, first they thought we wanna shorten supply lines, but it's not really about shortening supply lines, it's about keeping your data here under your control, not Yes. Somewhere else.

Yeah. Let's talk a little, how's that affected min io? A hundred Hundred percent.

Uh, uh, you know, AYA being software defined can run and be deployed anywhere, right? So that gives a lot of autonomy to our users and customers to deploy it and have the complete control in terms of their environment. Who gets to access the data?

What kind of workloads get run, what kind of AI models get run on Aya, right? As compared to, say for example, in Azure or in AWS, only very specific models can get run. And even if someone wants to use some open source model that is still within the AWS, uh, or Azure footprint and so on, we see this conversation coming up a lot more, as I was alluding to earlier, right?

It's AI that is driving what kind of tech stack you need to have rather than, you know, cloud providers kind of dominating that conversation, which was not the case earlier. So that is a major shift that has happened. And of course, sovereign AI is a big driver for making that shift happen.

Now, when we talk about sovereign ai, of course there are two players. One is, you know, the geopolitics of everything that is involved, whether it is Europe or, uh, UAE region or you know, APAC region and so on. I think for every country, and I have to quote Jenssen here, he was very interesting in, in CESI think he quoted that, uh, AI is going to become like telco or banking sector for every particular company.

You will need to have complete control of that. You will need to have your own AI environment at the end of the day, or AI infrastructure that, that, that is what it would mean for all the countries, unlike in past, you know, it took time in terms of technology to get, uh, uh, you know, from us to rest of the world. But I think with ai, it's just a level setting ground for all the, for all the countries together where everyone is innovating at the same pace.

And of course, open source models have made it much more easier to adopt and train on your own data sets. So I think there is multiple things that are happening in parallel, and AI is going to become so critical in terms of how everyday things will happen, you know, for machines to understand human language. It is phenomenal.

It is not a short term trend. This is, this is something real. And that's why I think the entire industry is so excited about this software's ability to write its own software.

I think with autonomous agents coming in next two years, it's, it's going to be quite interesting times that we will live in. And I think if you just foresee into the future, next two to three years, it becomes all the more important in terms of having the control of end-to-end tech stack. You cannot necessarily rely on one provider versus another.

And that is something that we see in us also, even though us is the leader when it comes to ai. Right now, even within us, if you see open AI target initiative, it's a collaboration to build their own data centers. Of course, Azure is there, but, uh, it is complete autonomy.

And now with OpenAI selling to UAE, it's, it's, it's a different dynamics. UAE, uh, UAE and OpenAI get to determine where their stack is going to deploy, not the other way around. That was happening earlier, so.

Right. Very interesting. And, and that's, that's what, you know, part of this sovereignty movement is, is that, you know, if you, if you take off the US filters and think about, let's say the UAE or Saudi Arabia or you know, any of these companies that are countries that are now striving to become AI factories.

Yes. Right? And, and the amount of money that they're putting into it is because they do want to be able to control it.

I think the world is a, you know, the whole globalism and trading thing has broken down, especially in this area where, no, we want it here. We want our stuff here. We're not gonna be at the mercy of any foreign Yes.

Kind of thing. And you don't wanna be, it'll be so critical, right? Uh, you don't know the kind of AI will be used in every single field.

There is no doubt about it from government storing their, uh, citizens' data to every single thing that it will touch. So it is, becomes extremely important in terms of having that kind of independence. I feel like, I mean, it is going to be just table stakes at the end of the day.

And that is where I think every, not only the countries but enterprises, the large enterprises, how they are thinking about the AI strategy as well, need to really think in terms of what goes into that AI stack. What is the reference AI stack design that they want to go standardize across so they can be free from, uh, all the liabilities that will come eventually once the AI becomes a little bit more mature from enterprise standpoint. I get it.

What's interesting, they, they also, in, in some weird way, this almost works against the, the piper scalers, the public clouts, right? Even, you know, Microsoft and, and Google and well, of course it's Microsoft, Google, and AWS. But I think a lot of companies that are looking for that sovereignty though, they all have sovereignty offerings, right?

They're all doing that now. A lot of them are saying, it's not just sovereignty of, I want it in my own country. It's sovereignty over control of my data, control over my infrastructure.

I don't wanna farm it out to a SA SaaS provider. I don't wanna farm it out to the hyperscaler. Yeah.

I want to almost build my own data center or rent my own space. Absolutely. And run it.

That's sovereignty. It's not just national sovereignty. A Hundred percent, a hundred percent.

It, it's being completely autonomous, having complete control on the stack on the data that you are, and complete control on the models that get to run in terms from training, uh, uh, to inferencing. Absolutely. Rema, we're, we're running low on time.

Look, time is being crunched though. Yes. As we look towards next year, I don't know if we could look beyond next year to tell you.

I think so either as we, yeah. If we look towards next year, the end of next year, where does this sovereignty movement take us? I think sovereign move movement is, there will be two things that will happen, and I don't know if it is going to happen in a year's timeframe or not, but I think, uh, first of all, you know, in terms of the neo clouds that are coming up, I think we will see more of those just because I think the dynamics in terms of hyperscalers coming up with their own GPUs and other things, I, I think in terms of the demand and accessibility of the GPUs are going to become much more probable with more and more new clouds coming in.

So enterprises who want to lean on to run compute, they will be able to leverage them more effectively. I think that is something that, that we see happening. And second thing I think that, uh, we will see happening is I think maturity in terms of, uh, the specific task for enterprises right now, what's going on, uh, within, um, ai, if you see, it's all about unstructured data documents, PDFs and whatnot.

And of course the other part is software writing. It's software. But I think if you see bulk of the enterprise data, it is still structured data.

And uh, I do believe that sometime next year and Databricks and announced it early preview, I think yesterday with their announcement of, uh, the big funding round. But in terms of AI agents to be able to work directly on the structured enterprise data, I think that will be something to look forward to. So that, I do feel there are two different threats, but uh, those are the short term, at least visibility that I can, uh, provide.

I love it. Rema, we're about outta time for people wanting to get more information. Aya, what's their best course?

io and uh, you can, uh, read more about the product. Uh, we are open source. You can download our, uh, product as well from GitHub.

So it's pretty simple, easy to use, and we have public documentation. So go ahead and try and run all the modeling on. Fantastic.

Gima, thank you for coming here on Text Trunk tv. You've been very gracious. We appreciate it.

Come back and keep us posted on what's going on at min io. Likewise, Alan, it was a pleasure to be here. And again, thank you for having me.

Alright, Gima Kaur, co-founder, CEO min io, min io here on Tech Trunk tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.