Leil Seed Round, November 2025

Leil has raised €1.5 million in seed funding to make hyperscale storage infrastructure more accessible and energy-efficient for organizations managing very large datasets, with the round led by Karma Ventures and participation from Specialist VC. The funding comes amid rapid growth in enterprise storage demand, a market valued at approximately $22 billion and expanding at nearly 20% annually. With over 330 million terabytes of data generated daily and volumes expected to triple by 2030, the cost and power requirements of conventional hard-drive systems are becoming increasingly prohibitive. At current rates, a full year of 2010’s data is now generated in roughly six days, underscoring the need for lower-energy, higher-density storage infrastructure.

Leil develops software that enables high-density shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drives to be deployed at enterprise scale. SMR overlaps data tracks like roof shingles, accommodating around 20% more data per disk than conventional CMR drives commonly used in data centers. This density translates into approximately 20% lower cost per terabyte and reduced power consumption, which compounds downstream by requiring fewer drives—lowering hardware spend, energy usage, cooling demands, and operational overhead.

Industry adoption validates the model: Dropbox reports operating about 90% of its storage fleet on SMR, achieving notable cost and power-efficiency gains per terabyte. Historically, however, SMR’s overlapping track geometry necessitated sequential writes to avoid overwrites or corruption, demanding specialized software and limiting real-world use primarily to hyperscalers such as Google, AWS, and Meta. Those companies built proprietary tools for internal workloads but did not commercialize them, leaving most of the market without a viable solution.

Leil’s platform automates the complexities of SMR at scale by orchestrating how data is written, moved, and recovered across thousands of drives while preserving density and efficiency. A key capability is content-aware classification by access patterns: the system groups inactive files and powers down the corresponding drives until needed, enabling up to 70% energy savings depending on workload without compromising availability. The software is already in use across data-intensive environments, including national broadcasters, public archives, data and AI training centers, and research institutes managing multi-petabyte estates.

The company operates a capacity-based subscription model and supports gradual adoption, allowing organizations to deploy alongside existing infrastructure and integrate SMR drives over time. This approach lets enterprises capture savings and efficiency gains without disruptive rip-and-replace cycles.

Commenting on the raise, Co-founder and CEO Aleksandr Ragel said the next wave of AI and scientific innovation is straining under the weight and cost of its data, and that Leil aims to bring hyperscale storage economics to every enterprise while reducing environmental impact and keeping critical data under customer control. He emphasized the firm’s HDD-native architecture as a foundation for resilient, efficient, high-performance storage at scale.

Karma Ventures Partner Kristjan Laanemaa highlighted the team’s blend of deep storage expertise and productization capability, noting that AI requires not just compute but smarter, sovereign data infrastructure to store the massive datasets underpinning modern models. He framed Leil’s technology as a direct response to that bottleneck.