Leil is Developing Hyperscale Storage Infrastructure Accessible for All

Leil, developing infinite file storage without cloud, led by Aleksandr Ragel, David Gerstein, Piotr Modrzyk, and Werner Paulus, has secured €1.5 million in seed funding led by Karma Ventures, with participation from Specialist VC.

The $22 billion enterprise storage market is growing nearly 20% annually as global data generation surpasses 330 million terabytes per day, set to triple by 2030. Storing and scaling this data on traditional hard drives is becoming costlier and more energy-intensive, creating urgent demand for lower-power storage solutions.

Leil’s software makes high-density SMR hard drives viable at enterprise scale, storing ~20% more data per disk than conventional drives. This boosts efficiency, cutting storage costs, power use, and infrastructure overhead.

Dropbox runs 90% of its storage on SMR drives, achieving major cost and power savings. Yet SMR’s sequential write requirement has long limited its use to hyperscalers like Google and Meta, who built in-house tools. Leil automates this complexity, managing data flow, recovery, and power states across thousands of drives. By grouping inactive files and powering down idle disks, it cuts energy use by up to 70% without affecting availability.

SMR drives are ideal for data-heavy organisations like national broadcasters, public archives, AI training centres, and research institutes managing multi-petabyte systems. Leil’s software is already deployed across these sectors.

Leil uses a capacity-based subscription model that supports gradual integration with existing infrastructure. The new funding will accelerate its go-to-market efforts, expand the product roadmap, and grow its commercial team.