The round comes from a variety of investors, including Cockroach Labs, Ionic Security, Pindrop Security, and angel investors from Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Techstars.
Less than a year ago, Storj Labs moved from Atlanta to Salt Lake City because they believed Utah offered a great opportunity to grow their business. When I profiled Storj in September 2016, their co-founders had just launched beta mode and were excited about setting up shop in a new area:
“Utah is growing really rapidly,” said Storj co-founder John Quinn. “There’s a great tech market here, you see it developing on the Silicon Slopes and down in Provo. There’s great developer bootcamps, DevMountain, DevPoint Labs, that kind of thing. There’s great tech programs at BYU and the U of U. It’s a market that is on its way up.”
Since then, things have been moving quickly and yesterday Storj Labs announced a $3 million seed round from a variety of investors, including Cockroach Labs, Ionic Security, Pindrop Security, and angel investors from Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, and Techstars.
To quickly recap my original article, Storj revolves around the idea of decentralized cloud storage. Instead of trusting your data to dwell in a data center owned by Amazon or Google, Storj relies upon torrent-style cloud storage spread across different peers and computers — “farmers” rent out their hard drive space and bandwidth, creating a secure storage network that is always chained together.
“Storj aims to revolutionize cloud storage by putting the user back in control over their devices and their data,” said Shawn Wilkinson, co-founder of Storj Labs. “The decentralized aspect of Storj means there are no central servers to be compromised, and because of the use of client-side encryption, only the end users have access to their unencrypted files and encryption keys.”
Since their platform was made available to the public, Storj has onboarded nearly 10,000 farmers and over 15,000 API users. In addition to the seed round, Storj was also awarded a grant as part of the (takes a deep breath) Utah Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) Technology Commercialization and Innovation Program (TCIP), designed to recognize and boost rising technologies within Utah.
“As a seed investor, we were more than happy to join the next round for Storj with a great line up of co-investors,” said Simon Dixon, CEO of BnkToTheFuture.com. “We want storing files to be cheaper, faster and more secure and the progress the Storj team has made towards that mission has been phenomenal to watch. We are looking forward to putting more and more of our documents on the Blockchain thanks to Storj.”
