Backblaze has appointed Anuj Kumar as Chief Revenue Officer. The appointment strengthens the company’s go-to-market leadership as AI-driven workloads create new demand for scalable cloud storage infrastructure.
Backblaze appoints Anuj Kumar as Chief Revenue Officer to lead global sales, channel, and revenue operations .
Kumar previously served as SVP and General Manager for North America at SUSE and as CRO at HUMAN Security .
He held senior sales leadership roles at NetApp, VMware, Rackspace, Verisign, and Red Hat across three continents .
Backblaze's B2 Cloud Storage business grew 26% year over year in 2025 and recently closed its first eight-figure total contract value deal .
The company pursues dual AI growth vectors: serving neocloud GPU providers ($14B storage opportunity by 2030) and AI-native developers .
Backblaze serves over 500,000 customers in 175 countries, including hundreds of AI companies across model training, audio/video generation, and enterprise AI development.
"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, 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."
“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, CEO, 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.”
Prior to Backblaze, Kumar served as SVP and General Manager for North America at SUSE, and previously as Chief Revenue Officer at HUMAN Security. Earlier in his career, he held senior sales and go-to-market leadership roles at NetApp, VMware, Rackspace, Verisign and Red Hat, living and working across three continents and thirteen cities globally. Kumar holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from BIT Mesra.
The appointment aligns with Backblaze’s dual AI growth strategy: supporting neocloud GPU providers on the supply side and enabling AI-native developers and enterprises on the demand side. This positions the company to capture significant storage opportunities driven by the expanding AI ecosystem.
About Backblaze
Backblaze gives businesses the freedom to innovate without limits by removing the barriers of lock-in, complexity, and cost. Our high-performance cloud object storage accelerates AI workflows, powers data-heavy applications, streamlines media management, and protects critical data. As an award-winning independent cloud, we provide unparalleled levels of interoperability that enable over 500,000 of our customers to reach and serve hundreds of millions of end users in 175 countries around the world.
