Vice President Finance & Controller - Finance & Controller

Greater St. Louis, Inc., GeoSTL ink MOU to grow region's geospatial economy. Pictured Above: Ron Kitchens (left) and Mark Munsell Date posted: september 15, 2026. Posted in: regionalism. Greater St. Louis, Inc. and GeoSTL have formalized a partnership aimed at accelerating growth of the St. Louis region's geospatial technology sector, an ecosystem estimated at nearly $5 billion annually. The organizations have signed a memorandum of understanding that builds on their existing relationship and calls for closer collaboration on business attraction and expansion, public relations and public policy. The agreement comes as St. Louis works to capitalize on major investments in geospatial technology, including the $1.7 billion-plus National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency campus in North St. Louis and growing activity around geospatial artificial intelligence. GeoSTL was formed in January and formally launched in February as the regional "backbone" organization for the geospatial ecosystem, succeeding the GeoFutures initiative originally convened by Greater St. Louis, Inc. Its role is to connect industry, government, universities, entrepreneurs, investors and community organizations around a common strategy for growing companies, developing talent and attracting investment. "St. Louis has the assets, expertise, and momentum to lead the nation in geospatial technology," GeoSTL Executive Director Mark Munsell said in announcing the agreement. He said the partnership will strengthen efforts to connect talent, accelerate innovation and turn the region's geospatial assets into long-term economic growth. Greater St. Louis, Inc. Managing Partner Ron Kitchens said formalizing the organizations' relationship will help build on the region's emerging position as a national center for geospatial research and innovation. Working to Attract Geospatial Companies Under the agreement, the organizations will work jointly to attract geospatial companies while supporting companies already operating in the region. The partnership also extends into public policy. Among the initiatives cited by the organizations is support for the Missouri GIS Advisory Council Act, intended to create a formal structure for statewide geospatial strategy and coordination, as well as efforts to restore funding for the Missouri Technology Corporation. The agreement follows another major geospatial announcement in August. GeoSTL is spearheading development of the Spirit of St. Louis AI Innovation Center in partnership with technology companies including World Wide Technology, Google, Amazon Web Services, NVIDIA, Overture Maps Foundation and WEKA. The initiative is intended to provide advanced computing infrastructure for AI and geospatial innovation. Broader Strategies of Careers, Entrepreneurship The broader regional strategy goes beyond technology development. GeoSTL's work includes expanding pathways into geospatial careers, supporting entrepreneurship and commercialization, attracting companies and investment, and measuring progress through job creation, investment and business growth. The organization is also placing particular emphasis on connecting growth in the geospatial sector with economic opportunity in North St. Louis, where the new NGA campus represents one of the largest federal investments in the city's history.

WEKA partnering Backblaze for its B2 cloud storage. Chris Mellor STORAGE EDITOR Blocks & Files editor Published thu 10 Sep 2026 // 14:03 UTC WEKA, which supplies high-speed unstructured data access for AI and accelerated computing, has a deal with Backblaze to store data needed for re-use in its B2 cloud storage. The two companies say GPUs need extremely fast access to data to stay fed, while the datasets, checkpoints and outputs surrounding those workloads are growing toward enormous scale and that data can need retaining. They are combining WEKA NeuralMesh for performance-sensitive AI and accelerated computing workloads with Backblaze B2 cloud object storage as the capacity layer for large datasets and retained AI assets. In effect, hot data in WEKA and cold data in B2's cloud. Data can be kept on the appropriate tier as it moves through ingestion, training, checkpointing, inference and downstream workflows. You can't keep once hot AI data on flash for ever. Gleb Budman, Backblaze's CEO, said: "AI teams need their GPUs fed and an infrastructure with the performance and capacity to support the full AI data workflow. WEKA has mastered the performance tier. Blocks & Files has spent nearly two decades doing the same for capacity storage. Together, AI teams get a qualified, complete solution to ensure fast and efficient production,. WEKA Chief Strategy Officer Nilesh Patel, neatly put forward WEKA's point of view: "AI workloads are stretching storage in two directions at once. GPUs need microsecond access to data to stay fed, while datasets and checkpoints are growing to exabyte scale. Our collaboration with Backblaze gives customers a validated path to both - without the cost of building and testing that integration themselves. Speed where it matters, scale wherever you need it." For example, raw training data (training sets, media libraries, source files) can reside in B2, move into NeuralMesh when needed for a performance-sensitive workload, and checkpoints and outputs can then return to B2 for retention and future reuse, or in situations where recovery to an earlier stage of testing is necessary. WEKA's Snap-to-Object capability has tested with Backblaze, enabling teams to recover checkpoints or saved inference data from the B2 capacity tier. Backblaze recently signed a $335 million strategic agreement with CoreWeave for that Neocloud to use B2 cloud storage for retained AI data. Coreweave is the fourth major AI cloud infrastructure company to contract with Backblaze in this way. Certification of B2 Cloud Storage for NeuralMesh is underway. Customers can contact Backblaze or WEKA to get started. Bootnote. Scality and WEKA set up a similar deal to the WEKA-Backblaze one, using WEKA's NeuralMesh high-performance storage with Scality RING's cost-efficient object tier, in February this year. Backblaze competitor Wasabi is also providing cloud storage for AI. It has formed a dedicated AI business, and appointed semiconductor and storage veteran Pinaki Mukherjee as SVP and GM to lead it. It says it stores hundreds of petabytes of AI data for frontier model labs, generative AI startups, and Neocloud compute providers worldwide. The new AI business will bring dedicated strategy, partnerships and go-to-market focus for this demand as AI infrastructure matures. Wasabi raised $70 million for AI cloud storage funding in January, and subsequently arranged a $250 million credit facility.

Backblaze and WEKA have announced a collaboration to simplify data management across the AI lifecycle. The partnership combines WEKA's NeuralMesh platform, designed for performance-intensive AI workloads, with Backblaze B2 cloud object storage for large-scale data retention. The solution allows AI teams to keep performance-sensitive workloads on WEKA NeuralMesh whilst storing large datasets, checkpoints, and outputs in Backblaze B2. The integration has been pre-validated, eliminating the need for customers to build and test their own systems. Customers can retain raw training data in B2 and transfer it to NeuralMesh when needed for high-performance computing. WEKA's Snap-to-Object capability enables teams to revert to previous checkpoints or recover inference data. Certification of B2 Cloud Storage for NeuralMesh is currently underway. Backblaze serves over 500,000 customers, whilst WEKA is trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50.