Backblaze names Anuj Kumar as chief revenue officer

Backblaze has appointed Anuj Kumar as chief revenue officer as the cloud storage company expands its sales leadership to meet rising demand tied to AI infrastructure.

Kumar will oversee global sales, channel, and revenue operations. He joins after more than two decades in cloud and enterprise infrastructure, including senior roles at NetApp, SUSE, and HUMAN Security.

The appointment comes during stronger growth in Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage business. That unit grew 26% year on year in 2025, launched new products for neocloud providers and AI-native developers, and signed its first eight-figure total contract value deal.

Backblaze is looking to strengthen its position in two parts of the AI market: the supply side, where it provides storage for neocloud GPU providers, and the demand side, where it works with developers and enterprises building applications that create and process large datasets.

It says it already serves hundreds of AI businesses across model training, audio and video generation, and enterprise AI application development. Backblaze also cited an estimated $14 billion storage opportunity by 2030 tied to neocloud GPU providers.

Career path

Before joining Backblaze, Kumar was senior vice president and general manager for North America at SUSE. Earlier, he served as chief revenue officer at HUMAN Security and held senior sales and go-to-market roles at NetApp, VMware, Rackspace, Verisign, and Red Hat.

His time at NetApp is central to Backblaze's rationale for the hire. Kumar helped build NetApp's worldwide cloud business during a period of growth, experience Backblaze sees as relevant to its own market.

The appointment also reflects a broader commercial shift as Backblaze pushes further into enterprise accounts while trying to maintain its product-led roots. That balance has become more important as cloud infrastructure suppliers compete for AI-related workloads without losing smaller developers and existing customers.

Kumar described storage as a core part of the broader AI infrastructure buildout.

"The buildout of AI infrastructure is one of the largest capital replatformings in the history of enterprise technology, and storage underpins it," said Anuj Kumar, chief revenue officer at Backblaze. "Backblaze has built the right platform for this moment - high performance, S3-compatible, cost-efficient, and free from lock-ins that constrain what customers can do. My job is to make sure the market understands this, and to put in place the GTM motion and partnerships that turn that awareness into durable, compounding revenue."

AI focus

Backblaze's message reflects a broader push among storage and cloud suppliers to link their products more closely to AI spending. As companies build and run models, demand has grown for systems that can store and move the large volumes of data used in training, inference, and media-heavy applications.

Backblaze has long been known for backup and cloud storage services, but it has broadened its pitch to customers building AI systems and other data-intensive applications. That includes offers aimed at newer cloud providers focused on GPU access, a segment that has grown as demand for AI computing has outstripped supply from larger incumbents.

Chief executive officer Gleb Budman said Backblaze wanted a commercial leader with direct experience scaling in adjacent infrastructure markets.

"We are in the middle of a fundamental transformation. The opportunity in front of us demands a revenue leader who has done this at scale and in markets directly adjacent to ours," said Gleb Budman, chief executive officer at Backblaze. "Anuj built one of the most impressive cloud revenue growth stories in the enterprise infrastructure space at NetApp. He understands the neocloud and AI infrastructure ecosystem, he knows how to move upmarket without losing the product-led motion that made us who we are, and he can drive the pipeline discipline and execution rigor this phase of our growth requires."

Kumar holds a degree in electrical engineering from BIT Mesra and has worked across three continents and 13 cities during his career.