The fundraise was led by Inovo.vc, an early-stage investment fund focused on CEE startups, along with Notion Capital, 10X Founders, and Kestrel0x1. It will enable NodeShift to make its self-serve cloud platform available to fast-growth businesses everywhere.

In 2022, as many as 53% of small and medium businesses were spending more than $1.2 million annually on the cloud - up from 28% the previous year. NodeShift’s platform offers a cost-effective way for businesses to manage their cloud infrastructure needs, with storage prices up to 30 times cheaper than the likes of Amazon Web Services, compute 80% cheaper, and GPUs half the cost.

The platform also boasts faster deployment times and enhanced reliability than existing centralised cloud providers, confirmed by six months of Beta platform testing, during which NodeShift gained valuable feedback from a wide range of publicly traded companies, startups, and independent developers.

The company is co-founded by Andrey Surkov and Mihai Mărcuță, two former Cisco Systems engineers with extensive experience working across the world of cloud infrastructure and is backed by advisors from the Technical University of Munich.

Further, NodeShift has been selected by Intel out of over 600 funded deeptech startups for its Ignite programme, which offers hands-on support and expertise to cutting-edge companies with industry-disrupting technologies. Since its creation in 2019, Intel Ignite’s startups have jointly secured $1.3 billion in funding from technology investors.

Andrey Surkov, Co-founder and CEO of NodeShift, comments: “Amazon, Microsoft and Google have changed the face of cloud computing, but their market stranglehold has left millions of growing businesses locked into paying ever-higher prices for cloud access, while forgoing the right to data privacy as part of the terms of use. So we’ve created a vital new space for businesses that prioritise cloud infrastructure privacy, affordability, agility, and scalability.”

“We’re making decentralised cloud computing resources accessible to everyone via a simple UI that cuts through the complexity of choosing, configuring and managing multiple providers. Our goal is to empower every business leader, and every developer, to access the essential cloud services they need to build and grow, at a cost they can afford.”

NodeShift will leverage the new funding to onboard startups, SMBs enterprise customers who have been on its waitlist since July 2023 when the platform was tested by over 5,000 concurrent developers from larger enterprises and startups. Additionally, the Intel Ignite programme will provide unique resources to NodeShift such as access to dedicated data centres with Intel’s most desired hardware, Trust Domain Extensions, which launched in February. With this dedicated hardware along with the funding boost, NodeShift will be able to maximise its potential use-cases to offer a truly tailored service for enterprise customers that, until now, have been hesitant to explore decentralised cloud.

Tim Ronan, Managing Partner at Kestrel0x1, explains: “The modern day economy is powered by cloud services, yet the market is monopolised by three major providers – terrible for price competition and reliant on antiquated trust assumptions for handling data. NodeShift is building the alternative, making it easier and more affordable for fast-growth businesses and their developers to build secure cloud business applications. After years of experience deploying enterprise SaaS cloud platform, we’re thrilled to be backing the NodeShift team as they seek to redefine what is possible in the cloud.”

Ralph de Wargny, Director Intel Liftoff for Startups: “NodeShift is gearing up to redefine cloud services with a new paradigm based on decentralization, which will create new opportunities for innovation and will change the existing market dynamics. By being selected to both Intel startup accelerators, Intel Ignite and Intel Liftoff, the NodeShift founders will team up with experienced entrepreneurs, mentors, and engineers to create a solid foundation to get to the next level. This will enable NodeShift to accelerate the development of the technology of decentralisation and scale up the business globally.”