Leil raises €1.5 million to make hyperscale storage infrastructure accessible for all

Tallinn, Estonia – 6 November 2025 – Leil, a specialist data storage-infrastructure software company, has raised €1.5 million in seed funding to help organisations store enormous datasets more cost-efficiently and with lower energy use. The round was led by Karma Ventures, with participation from Specialist VC.

The enterprise storage market is valued at approximately $22 billion and growing at nearly 20% annually. Every day, the world now produces over 330 million terabytes of new data — a volume expected to triple by 2030. At current rates, we generate a full year of 2010’s data in roughly six days. Scaling these archives on conventional hard-drive systems is increasingly expensive and power-hungry, driving demand for lower-energy infrastructure.

Leil builds software that makes high-density shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drives practical at enterprise scale. SMR overlaps data tracks like roof shingles, fitting around 20% more data per disk than conventional CMR drives, used in most data centres today. This architectural efficiency reduces SMR drive costs by approximately 20% per terabyte and lowers power consumption. The benefits compound: needing fewer drives reduces hardware expenditure, energy consumption, cooling requirements and operational overhead.

Dropbox runs 90% of its storage fleet on SMR and has reported significant cost savings and power efficiency gains per terabyte.

However, the overlapping track design requires data to be written sequentially to prevent overwrites or corruption, necessitating specialised software. For over a decade, SMR usage remained almost exclusively confined to hyperscalers such as Google, AWS, and Meta. These companies developed proprietary tools for their own workloads but never commercialised them, leaving the broader market without a viable solution.
Leil’s software automates that complexity. It manages how data is written, moved and recovered across thousands of drives while retaining its higher density and lower power consumption. Crucially, it classifies content by access patterns, groups together inactive files, and powers down the respective drives until the data is needed again. Depending on the use case, this enables up to 70% energy savings without compromising availability.

SMR drives are best suited for data-intensive organisations, such as national broadcasters, public archives, data and AI training centres, and research institutes managing multi-petabyte installations (one petabyte equals 1,000 terabytes). Leil's software is already used by customers across these segments.

Leil operates on a capacity-based subscription model and supports a gradual infrastructure transition, allowing companies to deploy its software alongside existing hardware and integrate SMR drives over time.
The new capital will accelerate Leil's go-to-market strategy, with key priorities including expanding the product roadmap and growing the commercial team.