Hive, a distributed data storage and computing platform, has announced its launch and the completion of its €7 million seed fundraise.
Ambitious investment round
Global Ventures, a leading MEA venture capital firm, and OneRagtime, a French venture capital firm participated in the round as institutional investors. In addition, Tom Glocer, Lead Director of Morgan Stanley, Merck and former CEO of Thomson Reuters; Moritz Thiele, founder and former CEO of Finanzcheck.de; Kumar Yamani, CEO of OSI Digital; LeFonds of FrenchFounders and David Gurle participated as angel investors.
With the funds, Hive intends to disrupt the cloud market estimated to be worth $1.3 billion and dominated by centralised cloud providers. It will create a worldwide distributed platform allowing an unprecedented level of scale, capacity and performance while respecting our growing and essential needs as we enter deep in the next phase of the Internet – Web 3.0.
David Gurle, Founder and CEO of Hive, said: “I am delighted to announce Hive’s launch and our seed round, and thank our diverse group of stellar international investors for their support in this new venture. At Hive, we are using peer-to-peer technology to create how the cloud should have been originally built.”
Noor Sweid, General Partner at Global Ventures, said: “We are thrilled to support David and the Hive team as they build the future of storage and cloud computing globally. Web3 is poised to recreate and transform entire industries, including cloud storage and computing, bringing efficiency to an otherwise costly, poorly secured and frictional industry.”
Stéphanie Hospital, Founder & CEO at OneRagtime, said: “We strongly believe in the democratization of Hive’s decentralized peer-to-peer technology creating a safer, greener and cheaper cloud service. David Gurle brings to the table his exceptional vision and experience to allow Hive to achieve its full potential and become the first company to decentralise cloud services at scale leveraging unexploited storage and computational capacities.”
Tom Glocer, Lead Director of Morgan Stanley and Merck said: “I have worked with David Gurle and invested in the companies he has founded for 20 years. I am excited to support David in his newest venture, Hive, which combines an ambitious technology vision and a large addressable market at the crossroads of distributed computing.”
Moritz Thiele, founder and former CEO of Finanzcheck.de said: “We are very happy to be involved in such a significant computing project from the early beginning that will pave the way for the externalization of data”, said Moritz Thiele, shareholder of CoastCap.”
Kumar Yamani, CEO at OSI Digital, said: “I am pleased to be a lead angel investor in Hive which is the future of distributed and decentralized cloud solutions. Hive addresses the security, privacy, and sustainability concerns of the market by offering a solution that reduces energy usage while fully securing distributed data in the cloud.”
Why was Hive created?
Hive was founded by David Gurle, a renowned French serial entrepreneur and engineer in 2022. It is a pioneer of IP communications and distributed computing. Hive was created with the idea to bring into existence the next generation cloud, which provides both computing and data storage services via Hivenet, its peer-to-peer network, rather than from a centralised set of data centres.
The company enables users to contribute their computer’s resources to the network, in exchange for similar capacity from the network and/or monetary compensation. This creates a virtual distributed cloud by pooling all available computational and storage resources, allocating them based upon demand and rewarding users providing the resources.
Users, be it individuals or enterprises, can take total control over their data in a secure, private environment. It will make storing and sharing data more accessible and affordable for everyone, and significantly reduce computing & storage’s energy usage and carbon footprint. This is possible as it provides computing and storage resources closer to the users.
