Storj Raises $3 Million to Enhance Distributed Cloud Platform

Storj, an emerging service provider for distributed cloud storage, has secured $3 million in a seed funding round. The offering proved to be a massive hit, with demand exceeding availability. Investors from all over participated, such as Google Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures to name a couple.

While traditional data centers provide the majority of cloud storage services through technology heavyweights like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, they come with a hefty price tag. Maintaining and powering all of that hardware is a pretty penny in itself, but the potential costs of hardware failures and data leaks ups the stakes even further.

Thanks to its decentralized nature, Storj can employ thousands of “farmers” that rent out “plots” of storage on their hard drives as well as bandwidth. These farmers are then compensated for their resources with Storjcoin, which can be used in the self-sustaining ecosystem. The value of Storjcoin (SJCX) against bitcoin skyrocketed on the announcement of the funding but has been tempered to 0.00012621 at the time of writing.

Immediate support stands at 0.00011020, which could be an ideal entry point into a long-term buy position for SJCX-BTC. However, if this support is broken, then further downside will ensue.

“Storj aims to revolutionize cloud storage by putting the user back in control over their devices and their data,” said Shawn Wilkinson, co-founder, CEO and CTO of Storj Labs.

In Storj’s relatively nascent ecosystem compared to more traditional cloud storage solutions from tech giants, it already has more than 7,000 farmers, contributing bandwidth and storage.

Thanks to Storj’s partnership with Heroku, developers are now able to build, run, and operate applications exclusively in the cloud, expanding Storj’s usability outside of just data storage.

This system allows for a network that is “orders of magnitude more secure, up to ten times faster and 50 percent less expensive” compared to the aforementioned cloud storage providers. With Storj quoting storage at a rate of one and a half cents ($0.015) per month, and bandwidth at $0.05 per GB, these prices are immediately enticing to anyone familiar with OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive to name a few.

Moreover, since the data is distributed across not tens, but thousands of geographically distributed locations, your data is available to access virtually 100 percent of the time. Also since your data is encrypted with client-side encryption and held in chunks across different farmers, it is kept safe from prying eyes and malicious farmers, only being accessible by the end user.