- Nebulous — the company behind the Sia decentralized cloud storage platform — has raised $3.25 million led by Bain Capital Ventures
Nebulous — the company that is known for building the Sia decentralized cloud storage platform — recently announced that it closed a $3.25 million funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, A.Capital, Collaborative Fund, Dragonfly Capital Partners, Hack VC, INBlockchain, SV Angel, and other several other investors. This round of funding will enable Nebulous to scale and accelerate the development and adoption of Sia.
“The Sia developer community has seen massive growth in the past 3 months, including the addition of both consumer-facing and enterprise-facing startups that use Sia to power their applications,” said Nebulous CEO David Vorick. “These companies have brought substantial adoption and diversification to the Sia ecosystem, and are demonstrating that Sia is making a difference today in the lives of consumers and businesses.”
The cloud storage industry is currently dominated by a small number of players. As a result, the cloud industry often struggles with challenges in price, privacy, and reliability. And so Sia leverages blockchain technology to create a data storage marketplace that is more robust and more affordable than the traditional cloud storage providers. Data storage on Sia costs about $1 per TB per month — which is much cheaper than the main cloud storage providers.
Since the company was formed, users of the platform have already stored over 4 PB of data across 925,000 storage smart contracts. And the Sia network currently has 2 PB of available storage capacity and Sia software has been downloaded over 1 million times.
“Just as all conventional apps need conventional storage, decentralized apps need decentralized storage, which makes decentralized storage a core foundation of decentralized finance and the decentralized web,” added Bain Capital Ventures partner Salil Deshpande. “Sia is in production today, without architectural issues, and without reliance on yet-to-come fundamental technical breakthroughs.”
Nebulous has fostered a thriving community of third-party developers. These developers have set up file sharing websites like PixelDrain and Goobox, cloud offerings like Filebase and Sia-Cloud, and companion apps like Decentralizer and SiaCentral.
And Nebulous also announced v1.4.1, which makes Sia production-ready for storage. Version 1.4.1 adds seed-based file recovery, allowing users to backup and restore their files on a new computer using just their 29-word seed.
When combined with massively increased scalability to 20 TB per uploader, Sia is now competitive with traditional cloud storage providers. And features that are expected to arrive later this year include video streaming, integrations with popular applications, and early CDN capabilities.
