Startup Profile: Caeves Technology

Company name:
CAEVES (CAEVES Technology, Inc.)

HQ and offices:
HQ-Bedminster NJ; EMEA- Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands; APAC – Pune, India

Website:
caeves.com

Date founded:
January 2025

Founders and leaders:
CAEVES represents decades of combined knowledge and experience from a team intimately familiar with the challenges of data management. The principles and approaches we use were developed over years of innovation, delivering the best possible experience for our customers.

Shirish Phatak, founder and CEO
LinkedIn profile

Shirish founded several companies and advised that they were acquired, to name a few Tacit Networks acquired by Packeteer and then eventually Symantec, Velocious Networks by Akamai, and Talon Storage most recently by NetApp. Shirish is a technology and engineering executive with experience in the areas of product delivery, technology strategy, market analysis from a technology perspective. He has substantial expertise in bringing new products to the market and adapting existing products to suit market conditions.

Jaap van Duijvenbode, founder and VP, product management and customer experience
LinkedIn profile

Jaap is an experienced business leader and technologist, delivering pragmatic, structured approaches that help customers, partners, and global alliances unlock the full potential of their data estate. His expertise includes product management, building C- and D-level relationships with IT executives, advising on cloud and datacenter transformation strategies. Jaap was apart of the Packeteer/Blue Coat acquisition, and Talon Storage led acquisition by NetApp.

Andrew Mullen, founder, SV, global sales & alliances
LinkedIn profile

Andrew has been a visionary global sales executive with experience transforming cloud, SaaS, and data storage startups into global enterprises through high-performance sales, alliance, and go-to-market strategies.  Held senior leadership and was a significant contributor at Tacit Networks, Expand Networks, Velocious  Networks, and Talon Storage all acquired under Andrew’s tenure. Proven record delivering 3X–20X investor returns, leading multimillion-dollar acquisitions, and launching Azure-integrated solutions that redefine enterprise data management.

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Financial funding:
Privately Funded

Employees numbers:
25

Revenue:
Private

Technology:
Our Mission: Help organizations to optimize storage costs while bringing decades of “dark data” to life

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Enterprise data grows relentlessly, yet 80% of it sits cold and inactive. Despite this reality, IT departments continue paying premium prices to store petabytes on platforms designed for performance, not longevity. Traditional archives offer cost relief but create “dark data”, files effectively lost once stored. This structural inefficiency has become one of the largest hidden taxes in enterprise IT, forcing organizations into a false choice: pay too much or lose access.

CAEVES was built to attack this problem head-on. We refuse the trade-off between cost and access. By treating storage as an economics problem rather than a performance race, we deliver cost-optimized, deep, searchable infrastructure that preserves visibility, control, and future readiness. Archives become usable assets, not compliance graveyards. Data remains indexed and AI-ready.

Organizations cut costs up to 70% without sacrificing access or options. In a market full of abstraction and over-promising, we’re deliberately direct: smarter economics, preserved access, and customer sovereignty. Always.

Products:
CAEVES delivers cost-optimized, deep and searchable storage for enterprise file data, solving the economics problem of rising storage costs. Built natively for Microsoft Azure, our software-based solution slashes TCO by up to 70% by moving inactive “cold” data off premium tiers into deep object storage.

Unlike traditional archives that create “dark data”, CAEVES keeps your files accessible and indexed. It provides AI-ready infrastructure, integrating seamlessly with Microsoft 365 Search & Copilot so your historical intellectual property remains a visible, strategic asset.

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Deployed entirely within your own secure Microsoft Azure tenant, CAEVES preserves data sovereignty and security principles while ensuring your data is always ready for the future.

• Up to 70% TCO Reduction: Auto-tier cold data as efficient as $0.01/GB/month Azure Object Storage with zero egress fees
• 50x Faster Search: Instant semantic search across decades of historical data without rehydration delays
• AI-Ready Infrastructure: Native Microsoft 365 Copilot Connector enables RAG-enabled insights from archived content without exhausting infrastructure or applications
• Complete Data Sovereignty: All components run within your Azure tenant (compute, storage, encryption keys, and identity management)
• Enterprise-Grade Security: NTFS and Entra ID permissions preserved, item-level security filtering, WORM-compliant storage for audit readiness
• Instant Accessibility: Files remain instantly searchable and downloadable through multiprotocol file access (NFS/SMB) and Microsoft 365 Search & Copilot interfaces

Release and Roadmap:
CAEVES combines the economics of cloud object storage, the usability of modern file systems, and the requirements of AI-ready data access into a single platform that operates within the customer’s own Microsoft Azure tenant. CAEVES software-defined storage solution delivers a high-performance file system interface to Azure Object Storage and allows organizations to dramatically reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by up to 70% through data caching, tiering, and lifecycle management policies, while preserving continuous accessibility, security, and data governance. The analytics and metadata enrichment capabilities in CAEVES form the foundation for content classification, data sensitivity scoring, and data lineage tracking. Storage optimizer today; data intelligence platform for tomorrow.

The CAEVES roadmap includes a shift from reactive archiving to Autonomous Storage operations and cost optimization management. This move ensures that customers are never paying for “performance” storage it doesn’t use, while ensuring “hot” data is always ready when needed.

The CAEVES 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 Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server enabling integration with Claude, Gemini, 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 multiprotocol file access, Microsoft 365 Search & Copilot, Microsoft  Copilot Studio and Model Context Protocol as the primary enterprise interface for knowledge workers.

Pricing model and price:
Pricing Model, Tiered, Built for Growth

Our pricing model combines the flexibility of monthly billing with the strategic commitment of an annual agreement, so you can scale on your terms without compromising budget efficiency.

Customers subscribe to a 12-month contract, can be billed annually, quarterly and even billed monthly based on the maximum capacity used in that billing cycle. This means customers can ramp up or down as needed, with billing that adapts to your real-world usage, perfect for unpredictable workloads and dynamic scaling. CAVEVES designed a tiered structure that rewards scale, ensuring your total cost of ownership (TCO) improves as your data footprint grows:

By combining dynamic usage billing with volume-based discounts, our model ensures that customers are never locked into a static plan, and always positioned to optimize costs as you grow.

GTM:
The CAEVES Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy is built on a “Microsoft-First” philosophy, positioning the CAEVES Intelligent Deep Storage and CAEVES Copilot Connector as essential components of a customer’s Azure data estate. By utilizing the Microsoft Marketplace as the primary commercial engine, you streamline procurement while aligning with Microsoft’s own internal sales incentives.

CAEVES leverages these three distinct motions:

1. Direct Motion: Marketplace SaaS & Private Offers
   The direct motion focuses on Marketplace-led commerce, reducing friction for enterprise buyers who want to bypass long procurement cycles.
   • Public SaaS Offers: By listing CAEVES as a transactable SaaS subscription offer, you allow customers to discover and deploy the solution in the customer’s Microsoft Azure environment under 30 minutes. This self-service capability is ideal for the “First 5TB Free” pilot program, converting trials into paid subscriptions automatically
   • Azure Private Offers: For large enterprise accounts, CAEVES utilizes Private Offers. This allows for customized pricing, terms, and special payment agreements while still processing the transaction through the Marketplace
   • MACC Alignment: A critical “Direct” lever is Azure IP Co-sell eligibility. This ensures that 100% of a customer’s spend on CAEVES counts toward their Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). This transforms CAEVES from an “extra cost” into a way for customers to “burn down” their pre-paid Azure commitment, making the “Yes” much easier for CFOs
2. Indirect Motion: CSP and Partner-to-Partner (P2P)
   The indirect strategy scales CAEVES through the vast ecosystem of Microsoft Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs).
   • Scaling through Alliances: With the recent focus on deepening ISV GTM relationships, CAEVES is positioned to sell through partners who already own the customer relationship
   • CSPs as Distributors: By enabling Multiparty Private Offers (MPO), CAEVES allows a CSP to wrap their own services (e.g., data migration or governance consulting) around the CAEVES subscription. The partner gets their margin, the customer gets a single bill from their trusted partner, and CAEVES gains massive distribution without increasing direct sales headcount
   • Incentivizing the Channel: This motion leverages the Marketplace-first trend where partners are increasingly looking for transactable solutions that simplify their own billing and tax complexities
3. ISV Co-Sell: Collaborative Selling with Microsoft
   This is the force multiplier motion where Microsoft’s global sales force becomes an extension of the CAEVES sales team.
   • Strategic Alignment (Copilot & AI): Microsoft sellers are currently measured on Azure consumption and Copilot adoption. CAEVES aligns perfectly with these goals by:
     • Increasing Azure Storage consumption (Object Storage/Deep Archive)
     • Unlocking “Dark Data” for use in Microsoft 365 Copilot, which helps Microsoft sellers prove the value of Copilot licenses
   • Co-Sell Ready vs. Incentivized: By achieving IP Co-sell Incentivized status, Microsoft’s own Account Executives (AEs) and Specialist Team Units (STUs) receive a “seller retirement” (commission) when they help close a CAEVES deal. This motivates them to bring CAEVES into their largest accounts as a solution gap filler for high storage costs and AI readiness
   • Referral Management via Partner Center: This involves a disciplined loop of sharing leads with Microsoft sellers

CAEVES Marketplace Leverage

Customers:
CAEVES is provisioning on average 3-4 customers per month

Target market:
Organization Type

• Enterprise or mid-market (500 – >100,000 employees)
• Operating in data-intensive or regulated industries, such as:
• Financial Services, Insurance, Engineering, Construction, Design & Manufacturing, Healthcare, Pharma, Energy, Utilities
• Existing Microsoft 365 / Azure investment, ideally with Cloud, Data & AI interest

Buying Centers

• Primary: IT Infrastructure, Cloud Architecture, Data Management, Compliance
• Secondary: AI/ML, Data & Analytics, Knowledge Management, Digital Workplace

Technical Profile

• Mix of on-premises file storage (NAS/SAN) and Azure cloud
• Unstructured data volume >100TB, with >60% inactive data
• Reliance on Windows Server file shares or legacy backup archives
• Data scattered across file servers, archives, and object storage silos
• IT architecture managed by Storage, Cloud, or Infrastructure teams

Competition:
Target Opportunity
Data silos in Azure, AWS of Google Cloud hyperscalers

• Azure Files, Object Storage, Azure NetApp Files, S3, EC2, Storage / File Gateway, Google Cloud Storage
• Cloud software vendor lock-in: Egnyte, Nasuni, Panzura, CTERA
• Traditional legacy NAS vendors: NetApp, Isilon, HP Nimble, EOL infrastructure