Storj targets growth as Colby Winegar takes over as CEO

Storj, a distributed cloud storage platform, has announced leadership changes as it targets a new growth chapter.

The platform said in a press release on October 30 that Colby Winegar, until then the platform’s chief revenue officer, had been promoted and would be taking over as the new chief executive officer.

Winegar has served as Storj CRO for several years.

He now takes over as CEO and will oversee Storj’s next growth chapter as the distributed cloud services market rapidly expands.

The price of STORJ traded around $0.46 at the time of the news, largely flat on the day.

Outgoing CEO lauds Winegar’s contribution

As CRO, Winegar helped drive the blockchain-based cloud company to new highs, including across key partnerships, technical alliances and acquisitions.

Storj grew from a distributed cloud object storage provider to a major player in the industry, including as a platform for on-demand high performance graphics processing unit (GPU) compute.

Commenting on the leadership change and the new CEO, outgoing chief executive Ben Golub said:

“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.”

Golub, who remains as Storj’s executive board chair, has helped Winegar ease into his new role over a six-month transition period, the platform said.

Golub on his part points to the new chief “skills, experience, leadership and vision” as key to what will drive Storj to the next level.

Storj eyes growth in $2 trillion market

Before moving to Storj, Colby Winegar co-founded CrowdStorage, helping the company grow into a leading distributed cloud storage platform.

He also worked for Vivint Smart Home, overseeing strategic partnerships that included Best Buy and Airbnb.

Storj’s resources, including compute and GPU, are core to the platform’s quest to dominate a $2 trillion market.

Low costs and less carbon emissions put it ahead of several traditional cloud services, and is crucial to its growing traction.

“With AI adoption accelerating across industries, enterprises need new solutions to manage skyrocketing amounts of data while innovating more rapidly, affordably and sustainably,” Winegar said. “Storj is poised to provide this, unburdened by crushing procurement and infrastructure liabilities that hyperscalers like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are inherently hampered by.”

Storj, launched in 2018, is one the many decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) projects in the market.

Among top sector providers are Bittensor, Filecoin, Helium, Arweave, Akash and LivePeer.

Earlier this month, Storj announced the acquisition of PetaGene, the platform behind the distributed mount client cunoFS.

The deal aims at helping Storj enhance AI and data-intensive industries’ capabilities.

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