About Us

Storage Architected for AI™

The Quobyte Story

The world’s most demanding workloads, from AI and Machine Learning to High-Performance Computing (HPC), are often limited not by the power of GPUs but by the storage that feeds them. Traditional enterprise storage is too slow, unscalable and inflexible, while HPC storage is plagued by complexity and a lack of reliability.

Quobyte was founded to solve this fundamental problem. Our story begins with two ex-Googlers, Felix Hupfeld and Björn Kolbeck, who saw firsthand the power of the hyperscaler approach: resilient, scalable software running on commodity hardware that small teams can manage even at tremendous scale. They recognized that the scale of modern AI had outpaced traditional storage and that applying the design principles of hyperscaler systems and distributed computing to enterprise storage was the only way forward.

Quobyte - Architected for AI™

We created Quobyte to bring this efficiency and scalability to you. The result is storage Architected for AI™. Built from the ground up on two guiding principles, operational simplicity and bulletproof resiliency, Quobyte uses a distributed system with a flat, single-layer architecture that is predictable, easy to understand, and capable of scaling horizontally into the tens of thousands of servers.

Our resiliency is implemented entirely in software, with no need for exotic components or fragile hardware redundancy, and works at data center scale and beyond. The result is a software-defined storage system so simple and resilient that we make it available as a download, putting the power of hyperscaler storage directly into your hands instead of relying on inflexible appliances, restrictive managed services, or complex systems customers cannot aren’t allowed to touch.

Our Leadership

Björn Kolbeck

Co-Founder and CEO

Before taking over the helm at Quobyte, Björn spent time at Google working as tech lead for the hotel finder project (2011–2013). He was the lead developer for the open-source file system XtreemFS (2006–2011). Björn’s PhD thesis dealt with fault-tolerant replication.

Mark Lawrence

VP World Wide Sales and Business Development

Mark’s career spans 20 years in both business development and executive sales management positions. He was most recently the VP of Sales for Arkologic, holding the same position before at sTec, which was acquired by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Felix Hupfeld

Co-Founder and CTO

Felix manages Quobyte’s technology and pushes development forward. Before that, he worked as a tech lead and capacity planner in Google’s infrastructure team (2009–2013). He was the architect and project manager for XtreemFS (2006–2009). Felix’s PhD was on distributed storage.

Ilan Shmargad

SVP Business Development and Alliances

Ilan is a high performance business and technology executive with 25+ years of leadership in technology companies such as Mercury Interactive (spin-off), BMC Software, Neebula (acq. by Servicenow), Axis Security (acq. by HPE), ControlUp, where he has led global business development and alliances, scaling companies to $700M+ and fostering strategic exits of $100M-$500M.