When major cloud providers have excess computing power, they tend to discount it through programs like AWS and Azure's Spot Instances. After all, if the server is idle, it does not benefit the company. NodeShift takes this concept and provides a single API for accessing an independent data center operator's surplus compute, storage, and graphics accelerators, providing connectivity to low-cost distributed web services. By doing so, we aim to extend beyond the big cloud. It also provides a stronger warranty. Like Akash and Filecoin.
NodeShift today announced that it has raised $3.2 million in a seed funding round led by Inovo.vc, which focuses on startups based in Central and Eastern Europe, with participation also from Notion Capital, 10X Founders, and Kestrel0x1 did. Epic Games also participated as an angel investor.
The company was founded by Andrei Surkov and Mihai Markush. The two first met while interning at Cisco in 2016. While Surkov remained at Cisco (and at one point in the crypto industry), Markush left London to continue working at Microsoft Azure, Twitter and Epic Games over the next few years. . Still, they remained friends, and the project came to fruition when another friend accompanied him to Turkey to undergo a hair transplant. While in the recovery room, Surkov shared an idea for a company that would make this extra data center capacity available to developers. What do you think of the founding story?
“Many data centers have excess capacity sitting idle, with about 10% to 20% of excess capacity sitting idle, and there are hundreds of such data centers,” Markushka explained. Did. “Prices are very affordable. When compared to traditional cloud providers, prices are 70-80% cheaper.”
NodeShift promises to save users more than 70% on computing costs compared to large cloud providers. This includes getting access to his Nvidia accelerators, such as the in-demand A100 GPU, at a deep discount. Web3 Services also provides access to high-end consumer-grade accelerators like his RTX 4090 gaming GPU, although major cloud vendors cannot provide that. This may be slower, but it's much more affordable.
Surkov's experience with distributed systems for networking and cryptocurrencies at Cisco made him interested in why there is so much friction in using distributed computing. “We wanted to understand how to host DAPs in a fully decentralized manner, but found there was a huge amount of friction. Hosting fully decentralized storage is one thing. It's like: Compute is something else. And we combine all of this to remove the friction of tokens. You have to get tokens for each crypto project just to fund the infrastructure. . That's a huge amount of friction,'' Surkov said.
In fact, I think it would be difficult to convince a CFO to allow a team of developers to buy random cryptocurrencies, even to experiment with these services. Therefore, even though the price is high, it becomes a hassle to use these services in business situations.
It is worth noting that the founders have a very clear eye for the use of Web3 and blockchain technology. “We personally feel that Web3 and blockchain are often introduced in projects that don’t necessarily need it,” Markusz said.
In addition to these decentralized projects, NodeShift also has agreements with independent data center operators. The team notes that developers can choose exactly where to place their projects, all the way down to the data centers, and that these data centers are certified by the Uptime Institute and adhere to the standard SOC that enterprise users expect. 2 and ISO 27000 certification. When using these data centers, the company can also offer his SLA to those customers. This is difficult (or rather expensive) to do in the Web3 context.
However, this combination of traditional infrastructure and Web3 allows you to burst out capacity to these projects as needed at a low cost, effectively turning them into Spot Instances on NodeShift. is. On the data center side alone, the company says it currently has access to approximately 400,000 CPUs and 28 million terabytes of storage.
NodeShift will soon launch a Kubernetes platform that sits on top of all of this, making it easy to shift workloads as needed.
In addition, the team plans to use the funding for supply expansion and go-to-market efforts.
The company's competitors include Germany-based Impossible Cloud, which focuses solely on storage, while Salad focuses on AI/ML workloads on consumer hardware. ing.