Colby Winegar CEO, Storj

Storj Labs, Inc. announces Colby Winegar has been promoted to lead the distributed cloud platform provider as CEO.

He has served as Storj’s chief revenue officer for several years, driving pivotal strategic partnerships, technical alliances, acquisitions and new customers that have transformed the organization from a provider of distributed cloud object storage to a robust distributed cloud platform providing distributed storage, on-demand GPU compute and client mount file management.

He says: “I am honored to step into the role of CEO and energized by significant advances our company has made in transforming the future of distributed cloud services.“

Prior to Storj, he co-founded and led CrowdStorage, which was the world’s largest distributed cloud storage platform connecting underutilized storage space across geographies to provide secure, reliable, affordable cloud storage. He scaled CrowdStorage to serve over 1,000 customers, including Western Digital and Vivint. Colby also oversaw strategic partnerships and new growth opportunities for Vivint Smart Home, the smart home services provider in North America, where he launched partnerships with Best Buy and Airbnb.

“Colby has been instrumental to Storj’s most significant developments, from the acquisitions of Valdi and PetaGene this year, to cultivating outstanding customers and building an award-winning partner ecosystem,” said Ben Golub, outgoing Storj CEO and current executive board chairperson. “He is uniquely suited with skills, experience, leadership and vision needed to continue driving Storj towards its potential.“

Golub has served as Storj’s CEO and executive chair for just over 6 years. Initially joining as interim CEO, he has been in the process of transitioning CEO responsibilities to Winegar over the last 6 months. he will continue as executive chair. To backfill Colby’s prior CRO role as he moves into the CEO role, the company recently hired a direct sales team leader and promoted an individual to run the channel sales team. They both report directly to Colby.

Storj is disrupting the $2 trillion cloud services market with distributed solutions that yield up to 90% lower costs and 83% less carbon emissions for customers. By leveraging distributed resources, spanning storage, compute, GPU, and filemount, it is positioned to accelerate the world’s most challenging distributed workflow use cases – from video production to AI training and inference. Enterprise organizations are embracing the advantages of the distributed cloud – particularly due to its cost-efficiency and sustainability – without compromising on performance, scalability and security.

Colby says: “Especially with AI adoption accelerating across industries, enterprises need new solutions to manage skyrocketing amounts of data while innovating more rapidly, affordably and sustainably. Storj is poised to provide this, unburdened by crushing procurement and infrastructure liabilities that hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are inherently hampered by. I’m proud to step into the CEO role and continue leading the company’s direction together with technical alliance partners, customers and resellers which increasingly recognize the transformative capabilities Storj delivers through its distributed cloud.“

Firm’s S3 compatible storage architecture leverages unused capacity distributed across drives and data centers in over 100 countries and over 20,000 points of presence. It also provides GPUs on-demand via its distributed global network and offers a client mount so customers can treat file storage the same as object storage and vice-versa.

It is a successful DePIN organization and has bridged the gap between Web3 innovation and rigorous Enterprise requirements. The company’s growth and success has elevated market receptivity for DePIN solutions as a whole, and together with partners including LivePeer, Akash, POKT and HiveMapper. With storage and compute emerging as a top contributor of carbon emissions and expense for organizations – distributed solutions like Storj’s deliver an infinitely scalable solution by eliminating supply chain and resource demands, and waste. The firm delivers speed, scalability, security, reliability and sustainability by design, and is meeting the most data-intensive compute demands.

“It has been extremely gratifying to see the progress that Storj has made in pioneering a new, distributed approach to cloud services,” said Brian Lillie, Storj board member and president of Rackspace Private Cloud. “I’d like to thank Ben for his leadership in bringing Storj to this position and congratulate Colby on his new and expanded role.“