Tallinn-based Leil, a data storage infrastructure company, has raised €1.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Karma Ventrues, with participation from Specialist VC.
- Founded in 2022 by engineers Aleksandr Ragel and David Gerstein, Leil builds software that makes high-density shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives practical at enterprise scale. SMR fits ~20% more data per disk than conventional drives, lowering hardware cost per terabyte and reducing energy consumption. Dropbox already runs ~90% of its fleet on SMR.
- Historically, SMR was mostly accessible only to hyperscalers like Google, AWS, and Meta, who built proprietary tools but never commercialised them, the startup says. Leil automates this complexity for mainstream enterprises by managing how data is written, moved, and recovered across thousands of drives, while keeping density and efficiency gains. For cold-data workloads, the system can power down inactive drives, enabling up to 70% energy savings.
“AI needs more than compute — it needs smarter, sovereign infrastructure for storing the colossal datasets that models rely on. Leil is solving that bottleneck,” said Kristjan Laanemaa, Partner at Karma Ventures.
- The company targets data-intensive organisations such as public archives, national broadcasters, research institutes, and AI training centres with a multi-petabyte scale. Leil operates a capacity-based subscription model and can integrate alongside existing infrastructure for gradual adoption.
- With fresh capital, Leil will accelerate go-to-market efforts, expand its product roadmap, and grow its commercial team.
