French entrepreneur David Gurle launches a distributed storage and computing platform, Hive; raises €7M in Seed round

Hive, a company founded by renowned French serial entrepreneur and engineer David Gurle,  announced on Wednesday the launch of its platform. Hive also announced that it has secured €7M in its Seed round of funding.

Hive is on a mission to provide consumers and corporations total control over their data in a secure peer-to-peer environment.

Investors in this round

The company’s investment came from institutional investors Global Ventures, a leading MEA venture capital firm, and OneRagtime, a French venture capital firm.

Noor Sweid, General Partner at Global Ventures, says, “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. We are immensely enthusiastic about the possibilities of this new iteration of the internet and a decentralised solution to satisfy growing global demand for storage and computing, and especially excited by the potential of the Hive team to bring this future to life.”

The round was also joined by angel investors including 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 himself.

A distributed storage and computing platform

Hive was born to bring into existence the next-generation cloud, which provides both computing and data storage services via Hivenet, the company’s peer-to-peer network, rather than from a centralised set of data centres.

The company was founded by David Gurle, who is a renowned French serial entrepreneur and engineer, and also a pioneer of IP communications and distributed computing.

Hive helps 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 for providing the resources.

Hive will give users total control over their data in a secure and private environment. It will make storing and sharing data more accessible and affordable for everyone, and reduce computing & storage’s energy usage and carbon footprint by providing computing & storage resources closer to the users.

Founder David Gurle says, “At Hive, we are using peer-to-peer technology to create how the cloud should have been originally built. Hive will disrupt the cloud market dominated by centralised cloud providers. Hive 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 into the next phase of the Internet: Web 3.0.”

Gurle adds, “Users are increasingly worried about the security and privacy of their data, dependency on centralised cloud providers, and the growing impact of data centres on our planet. Hive will address these concerns and give users total control over their data in a secure, private environment.”

Market opportunity

According to data from MarketsandMarkets, the global cloud computing market is expected to increase to $947.3B by 2026 (2021: $445.3B) at a 16.3 per cent CAGR. Independent data from The Brainy Insights forecasts that the global cloud storage market will increase to $353.8B by 2028 (2020: $61.4B) at a 24.5 per cent CAGR.

To date, cloud storage and cloud computing services have relied upon big tech companies to fulfil 50-70 per cent of demand. However, this market is now being disrupted by changing attitudes from purchasers, societal changes, and rapidly evolving technology, which suits P2P alternative cloud providers such as Hive.

David Gurle, Hive’s founder and CEO, brings vast industry experience. 

Gurle is the founder and former CEO of Symphony Communication Services, LLC, a $1.5B+ unicorn, and a secure and compliant instant messaging service for financial services. Prior to Symphony, Gurle was GM and VP of Skype’s Business unit, a peer-to-peer messaging and video service acquired by Microsoft. He also served as Global Head of Collaboration Services at Thomson-Reuters, and founded and ran Microsoft’s Real Time Communications business unit.