CEO Jérôme Lecat stood in front of a roomful of journalists at Scality's Paris headquarters this week for an event that was part product launch, part re-introduction of the company he co-founded in 2009.
The product is a software platform that uses AI agents to manage enterprise data across four storage tiers, from ultra-fast flash to cold tape archives. However, the two years Scality spent developing it speaks to something larger: an established French tech company that is no longer a startup in the process of reinventing itself for an industry being relentlessly remade by AI.
By the numbers, all is well at Scality, a company that became an early international success in the emerging French tech ecosystem. Scality has roughly 240 employees in 16 countries. It generates more than €50 million in annual revenue. Seventy-five percent of that revenue comes from outside France and is, according to Lecat, "highly profitable." And yet, the accelerated transformation caused by generative and agentic AI is fundamentally changing customers' storage needs.
This puts Scality in an intriguing position, facing countless software incumbents. As AI rewrites the rules for how storage is built, sold, and operated, the company could be vulnerable. At the same time, if Scality can successfully adapt to the new agentic world with its latest products, the mid-sized company could potentially address larger markets beyond its core storage customers.
"Our ambition is bigger because we see what is possible," Lecat said. "If you walk into our office, we're like a young startup that has found something new and is just so eager to bring it to the world."
