Minio attracted $20 million in Series A funding in a move to accelerate development around its open source object storage product. That acceleration is almost immediate as the company also unveiled a multicloud object storage platform to take on Amazon S3.

Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners led the funding. Intel Capital, AME Cloud, and Docker CEO Steve Singh also participated. Minio started in 2015 with $3.3 million in seed funding.

Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder and CEO of Minio, said the funding will allow the company to accelerate an admitted late start into the object storage market.

“We were a bit late in getting out there, but that has allowed us to be more adaptable to recent changes in the market and have a stronger cloud-native approach,” Periasamy said.

Periasamy had previously founded Gluster, which was acquired by Red Hat for $136 million in 2011.

Minio came to light earlier this year, launching general availability of its container-based object storage.

The platform installs an object-storage server in a container, effectively turning object storage into part of the application’s software stack. The containerized form means that Minio and its storage networking can be deployed anywhere, along with the rest of the application.

Periasamy said the Minio platform is aimed at developers that have driven adoption of the product into enterprises.

The latest update includes support for Amazon S3 deployments. Periasamy said the product basically allows developers to move storage across public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments, with the new inclusion of Amazon S3 support.

The support allows developers to build their own S3-compatible object storage on bare metal, public cloud, existing storage area networks (SANs), or network attached storage (NAS) infrastructure. The move is designed to allow developers to break out of relying exclusively on Amazon S3 for their storage needs by allowing for the movement of stored data to any cloud or container provider.

The idea is not new, as a number of players operate in the object storage space. However, Periasamy said many of those solutions were built using previous generation thinking.

“With Docker and Kubernetes driving the container ecosystem, the stack is different today in a cloud-native environment,” Periasamy explained. “If you were to use those Open Stack-based systems you would not be able to stand against Amazon. The scale is larger today, and there are more tenants sharing infrastructure today.”

With new funds and now support for the market heavyweight, Periasamy has big ideas for Minio.

“My hope is that down the road there will be Amazon S3 on one side and Minio on the other side,” Periasamy said. “I hope to see the early signs of Minio emerging as the S3 alternative and operate outside of the Amazon ecosystem.”

Periasamy said Minio is interested in partnerships to achieve its mission, but only with vendors that have the scale to make a difference.

“We don’t want to create a big partnership program, which is only really good if you want to show a bunch of logos,” Periasamy said. “A lot of these small players will fall off soon so it doesn’t make sense to partner.”