IT Press Tour 67: Caeves Technology

We had the opportunity to meet Caeves Technology during the recent 67th edition of The IT Press Tour held last week in Sofia, Bulgaria.Caeves Technology, Inc. is an American startup headquartered in Morristown, NJ, with offices in the United States, the Netherlands, and India. Its founding team comes directly from Talon Storage Solutions, a company co-founded in 2012 that developed the Talon FAST edge caching technology before being acquired by NetApp in March 2020, now stopped by the San Jose giant company. After five years scaling NetApp’s cloud data services revenue, the team founded Caeves in 2024, operating in stealth mode before launching its flagship product, Caeves Intelligent Deep Storage, first in private preview on Microsoft Azure in August 2025, then in general availability worldwide in February 2026. The leadership team consists of Shirish H. Phatak, CEO and CTO, Jaap van Duijvenbode, VP, product & customer Experience, Andrew Mullen, SVP, sales & alliances, and Charles Foley, advisor. For this session, we had the privilege of hearing from Jaap van Duijvenbode, who brings both a deep knowledge of the product and first-hand insight into the genesis and history of Caeves.

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The comapny tackles two major structural problems in enterprise data management. The first is economic: according to Gartner, 30% of enterprise storage budgets are spent on cold or redundant data that delivers zero active business insight, while data volumes double every two years with no sign of slowing. The second is AI readiness: 85% of unstructured data is created once and never touched again by analytics or artificial intelligence tools. When data is archived to cold tiers or legacy systems, it becomes completely invisible to Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure AI Search, and all modern AI tools, directly undermining the ROI of enterprise AI investments. As Jensen Huang noted at Nvidia GTC in March 2026, unstructured data remains largely impossible to query, search, or index at scale, making it effectively useless to AI systems without a smarter infrastructure layer.

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Caeves Intelligent Deep Storage is a cloud-native storage solution built exclusively on Microsoft Azure, combining intelligent tiering, multi-protocol access supporting SMB and NFS, and native integration with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. The platform deploys in under 30 minutes entirely within the customer’s own Azure tenant, with no data ever leaving the customer’s environment. It provides automatic tiering from Hot to Cool to Archive to land on Azure Object Storage, reducing storage costs by up to 70% without any loss of access or performance. The Caeves Copilot Connector indexes historical archives directly into Microsoft Graph, making them accessible through Microsoft 365 Search and Microsoft Copilot, with no custom RAG pipeline or additional infrastructure required. Unlike most competitors, Caeves stores data directly in native Azure Blob format, meaning customers retain full access to their data at all times with no proprietary encoding, no extraction fees, and no lock-in, at a cost of $0.01–0.03/GB/month.

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The pricing model is entirely capacity-based, available through the Microsoft Marketplace. It offers a free tier up to 5TB (ideal for pilots and testing), followed by decreasing price tiers from $0.03/GB/month for small teams down to $0.01/GB/month beyond 1PB. Distribution channels rely on Azure Marketplace, Microsoft Co-Sell, SI/VAR partners, and eventually MSPs in multi-tenant mode. For organizations managing more than 200TB, the cost of Caeves is typically recovered within the first month of tiering savings alone.

The product roadmap includes a minor release in September 2026 and a major version in Q1 2027, featuring an Enterprise Management Plane with ROI dashboard, policy management, compliance and governance tools and a MCP Server enabling integration with Claude, Gemini, LangChain, Azure OpenAI, and Microsoft Foundry. The long-term vision is to position Caeves as the intelligence and context layer for enterprise data estates within the Azure ecosystem, evolving from a storage optimizer into a full data intelligence platform, with autonomous tiering operations and deep integration with Copilot Studio as the primary enterprise interface for knowledge workers.

The full presentation is available here.