Our Story
To revolutionize the software storage industry by changing the way people think and feel about software storage.


It all started with an idea…
A long time ago, in a Google office far, far away, two computer nerds- Felix Hupfeld and Björn Kolbeck– noticed the ease with which surprisingly small teams were operating the storage infrastructure fueling the tech giant’s servers and services. That’s when it hit them: their previous research and development for the distributed file system XtreemFS allowed for something along the same lines – but better. Something they knew would revolutionize the software storage industry.
The two followed through with the idea and in 2013 Quobyte was born. Bringing over 10 years of experience in distributed and storage systems and reuniting with some of their former associates from XtreemFS, they used the forerunner’s best parts and wrote Quobyte from scratch, but with a highly extended feature set.
Today, Quobyte creates a product that empowers its customers to not only keep up with the exploding amount of data, but also to gain a competitive edge. It helps customers build a reliable, scalable and flexible software-based storage infrastructure.
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.
Discover Why Our Customers Love Us
With the Quobyte Data Center File System we can use the all-flash hardware of our choice and are able to achieve the maximum performance of the drives and networking. And the scalable fault tolerance gives us the confidence we need to run as a scalable infrastructure.”
Infrastructure Engineer
I love the model that allows you to scale with your dollars and your return … That’s why we love Quobyte. And the support is enterprise-class, top notch.

Assistant Director for Biocomputing at Oregon State University’s Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing

The Quobyte feature set was the best offered and continues to be the top choice for Kubernetes-native functionality.”
Principal Engineer