Cloud hosting company NodeShift has raised millions of dollars in seed funding for its 'distributed cloud' offering.
As reported by TechCrunch, NodeShift has raised a $3.2 million seed funding round led by Inovo.vc, which focuses on startups based in central and eastern Europe, with participation from Notion Capital, 10x Founders, and Kestrel0x1.
NodeShift offers GPU, compute VMs, and storage services – with Kubernetes planned in the future. The company claims it can offer instances at more than 200 locations globally. The company was part of Intel’s Ignite accelerator program.
TechCrunch said the company aims to provide a single API for access to excess compute, storage, and graphics accelerators from 'independent data center operators' and through connections to low-cost decentralized web services like Akash and Filecoin.
The company says it currently has access to about 400,000 CPUs and 28 million terabytes of storage.
Nodeshift was founded by Andrey Surkov and Mihai Mărcuță. Both are former Cisco interns; Surkov stayed at Cisco and then moved into crypto, while Mărcuță later held roles at Microsoft Azure, Twitter, and Epic Games.
“A lot of data centers have spare capacity just sitting out there — about 10-20 percent of spare capacity just sitting there — and there’s hundreds of data centers like this,” Mărcuță said. “The price is very, very affordable. If you compare it to traditional cloud providers, we’re talking about prices that are 70 to 80 percent cheaper.”
Competitors include the likes of Germany-based Impossible Cloud, which focuses on storage, and Salad, which focuses on AI/ML workloads on consumer-grade hardware.
On LinkedIn, Inovo principal Karol Lasota said: Nodeshift is “ending the status quo in the cloud infrastructure market and challenging the big guns like AWS, GCP, and Azure through offering excess independent data centers capacity.”