SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm, is leading a €12 million (USD $13 million) Series A round for distributed cloud provider Hive, to increase access to sustainable, high-powered computing resources for businesses and individuals. OneRagtime, a French venture capital fund that led Hive’s Seed round, and a collection of private investors also joined the round.
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 drive and computing capacities. Hive’s model helps businesses efficiently manage their cloud-related expenses, reduce dependency on a select few cloud providers, and significantly reduces cloud energy use. In 2023, global data centres, which power the world’s cloud, required 7.4 Gigawatts of power, a 55% increase from 2022. Currently, data centres account for up to 3% of global electricity consumption, with projections suggesting this could rise to 4% by 2030.
“Hive is addressing the pressing need for a new cloud paradigm that democratizes access, lowers financial barriers, and encourages innovation,” said David Gurlé, Hive Founder. “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.”
Since October 2023, Hive has amassed over 25,000 total active users and contributors from 147 countries, who store their files on hiveDisk and contribute a portion of their unused hard drive to hiveNet to effectively lower their subscription costs and build the distributed cloud. The contributed computing capacity to hiveNet also powers hiveCompute, allowing companies to manage workloads, such as run GenAI inference, video processing, and 3D modelling. HiveNet’s architecture provides access to additional CPU, GPU, or NPU when needed, boosting the much-needed computing power. Companies seeking more control could also build their own private hiveNet, where IT managers retain full control over the devices.
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.
“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,” said Alex Manson, who heads SC Ventures. “In addition to our investment, our ventures will be leveraging Hive’s services.”
“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,” said Stéphanie Hospital, Founder & CEO at OneRagtime. “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.”
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’s sights are set on growing its team and global footprint, with a focus on addressing the enterprise markets starting with startups and SMBs. The team is prioritizing several areas of the business, including product development, building an engaged community of contributing Hivers, and sales and marketing efforts to reach users at scale.