Backblaze sponsors RAISE Summit; CEO Gleb Budman joins panel on sovereign cloud strategy and judges world's largest AI startup competition

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE), the high-performance cloud storage platform for the AI era, today announced its participation as a sponsor of RAISE Summit 2026 taking place July 8–9, 2026, at Le Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, France. Backblaze will confront the next AI infrastructure bottleneck: where data lives, how fast it moves, and what it costs to access. As AI-native enterprises and neocloud operators race to build sovereign, AI-ready infrastructure, Backblaze arrives at RAISE with expertise in the data foundations these businesses need – already supporting four leading AI clouds.

RAISE Summit 2026 brings together 9,000+ AI leaders, founders, investors, and policymakers from 2,000+ companies, making it the right stage for a conversation about what AI actually requires at the infrastructure layer.

CEO to Join Panel on Sovereign Cloud Strategy

Gleb Budman, co-founder and CEO of Backblaze, will join a leadership panel on sovereign cloud strategy prior to a keynote by Yann LeCun, co-founder and executive chairman of AMI Labs. The discussion will explore how neocloud operators and enterprise AI teams are rethinking infrastructure in an era where data control, cost predictability, and performance under GPU-scale workloads are no longer negotiable.

Budman will bring Backblaze's perspective as an independent storage platform that can deliver the high-throughput, burst-ready performance that AI pipelines demand, alongside the scale and economics their business models require—a perspective grounded in Backblaze’s experience operating cloud storage infrastructure for both AI-native enterprise customers and technology partners that embed B2 Cloud Storage into their own platforms.

"The infrastructure decisions being made right now will define which AI strategies actually succeed," said Budman. "Sovereign cloud isn't just a compliance checkbox; it's about what controls your data. That means storage you can access without punitive egress fees, without vendor lock-in, on infrastructure engineered for how these AI workloads behave."

Backblaze to Judge World's Largest AI Startup Competition

Budman will also serve as a final-round judge and overall sponsor of RAISE the STAKES, the world's largest AI startup competition, with a prize pool exceeding €10 million and more than 1,500 applicants.

James Leaverton, Director of Startups & Developer Relations at Backblaze, will serve as a judge in the preliminary round of the competition’s Cloud Infrastructure track. Leaverton leads the Backblaze Flamethrower program, a founder-first initiative offering early-stage AI and data-heavy startups up to $100,000 in storage credits, production-grade object storage, predictable pricing, and direct technical support from people who have built at scale.

About Backblaze

Backblaze (NASDAQ:BLZE) 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. For more information, please go to www.backblaze.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260707442730/en/

Media Contact

Renatta Siewert

press@backblaze.com