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.
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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.
Leadership
Björn Kolbeck
Co-Founder and CEO
Felix Hupfeld
Co-Founder and CTO
Andrew Perry
VP World Wide Sales and Business Development
Jodi Rodgers
Sales US West
Robert Döbbelin
Head of Client Engineering
Saurabh Kumar (SK)
Head of Marketing
Board
Dr. Björn Kolbeck
Co-Founder and CEO, Quobyte
Dr. Felix Hupfeld
Co-Founder and CTO
Romy Schnelle
Managing Director, HTGF
Dr. Berthold von Freyberg
Partner, Target Partners
Amit Shofar
Investment Director, Samsung Catalyst Fund
Investors
A European venture capital firm based in Munich, Germany, specializing in early-stage technology companies.
A German seed investor focusing on high-potential startups in various technology sectors.
The venture capital arm of Samsung Electronics, investing in disruptive technologies and innovative startups.
A growth capital firm investing in technology-driven companies with scalable business models.
AI Success at Scale: See Who's Running Quobyte
Since it runs on commodity hardware, we were able to migrate data and storage capacity to the Quobyte cluster one server at a time, reusing all the storage hardware we had already purchased. Quobyte rebalanced all the data across the cluster automatically. The whole process was seamless. 1bn+1bn+ Datasets on Quobyte60+FDA approved Al models
Quobyte ticks the boxes for massive capacity and performance scalability using software-defined storage. STFC runs Quobyte on commodity hardware freeing them from proprietary hardware solutions 90 PBSingle Cluster1.5bn+Files
Performance-wise, I can say Quobyte does everything I was hoping for it to do. For example, in some processing scenarios, where you'd trigger something that evicts data from memory, our old server would fall flat on its face. Quobyte performs consistently, so our storage can now keep up with our data processing 16TB Data Generated Daily200Active Projects
In the Press
Quobyte brings GPU-converged storage to AI clusters
Quobyte’s quiet performance and scale superiority
Power and UDM Requirements Cast Shadow on AI at Super Computing Conference 2025