SC Ventures (Standard Chartered’s ventures arm) is leading a €12 million (USD $13 million) Series A funding round for distributed cloud provider Hive, which aims to increase businesses’ and individuals’ access to sustainable and high-powered computing resources. OneRagtime, a French venture capital fund that led Hive’s Seed round, and a collection of private investors joined the round.
Hive’s distributed cloud aggregates individual devices’ unused hard drives and computing capacities. And Hive is reinventing the cloud from a centralized model that uses expensive physical servers to a distributed cloud infrastructure that aggregates individual devices’ unused hard drives and computing capacities.
Hive’s model helps businesses efficiently manage their cloud-related expenses, reduce dependency on several cloud providers, and significantly reduce cloud energy use.
Since October 2023, Hive has had over 25,000 active users and contributors from 147 countries. These users store their files on hiveDisk and contribute unused hard drives to hiveNet to lower their subscription costs and effectively build the distributed cloud.
The computing capacity contributed to hiveNet also powers hiveCompute, allowing companies to manage workloads, such as running GenAI inference, video processing, and 3D modeling. And HiveNet’s architecture provides access to additional CPU, GPU, or NPU when needed, boosting the much-needed computing power. Companies looking for more control could build their private hiveNet, where IT managers control the devices entirely.
In December, Hive unveiled a Joint Development Partner (JDP) initiative, working closely with key partners to innovate the cloud landscape for businesses leveraging GenAI LLM computations.
Hive is a champion of sustainable technological progress, offering a practical solution to the challenges posed by traditional cloud computing models. With its latest funding round, Hive is set on growing its team and global footprint to address the enterprise markets, starting with startups and SMBs. The team prioritizes several business areas, including product development, building an engaged community of contributing Hivers, and sales and marketing efforts to reach users at scale.
KEY QUOTES:
“Hive is addressing the pressing need for a new cloud paradigm that democratizes access, lowers financial barriers, and encourages innovation. With over 70% of the computing power available in our devices and billions of devices connected to the Internet, Hive’s community driven model builds ‘The Right Cloud’ to offer a greener, more resilient network and secure alternative that also promotes a more equitable cloud solution. We thank our investors, as well as INRIA and Bpifrance, for their continuous support as we look to achieve our ambitious goals.”
– David Gurlé, Hive Founder
“We are big believers of Hive’s distributed cloud technology that will enable cheaper and more efficient access to computing power and storage, a critical point when most of our ventures may have an AI component requiring increasing such computing power. In addition to our investment, our ventures will be leveraging Hive’s services.”
– Alex Manson, who heads SC Ventures
“Cloud technology has opened up horizons of innovation, but it also comes with challenges in terms of costs, security, data privacy, and environmental impact, heightened by the increasing demand for computing resources, especially for artificial intelligence. Hive, with its pioneering approach to distributed cloud, makes cloud access more secure, affordable, and efficient for everyone, and enables the sharing of computational power resources. As an early investor and believer, OneRagtime is particularly excited to support Hive’s vision and team.”
– Stéphanie Hospital, Founder & CEO at OneRagtime
