Impossible Cloud is looking to take the next-gen cloud industry by storm. The company’s mission — should it choose to accept it — is to leverage a decentralized data center ecosystem with decentralized cloud-computing technology to deliver higher-performing and more affordable cloud services.
But what does “decentralized” mean when it comes to cloud – or more specifically, Impossible Cloud? Rather than operating its own central server — which can lead to potential issues like multiple points of failure, scalability barriers and geographic latency — the company instead purchases excess capacity in enterprise-grade data centers and provides the orchestration middle-man role to growing enterprises.
Lennart Rother, Impossible Cloud’s Director of Growth, told Silverlinings this eliminates single points of failure, enables stronger network performance and a sustainable path to scaling, and even more substantially, up to an 80% drop in cloud TCO for enterprise customers. The multi-service platform offers a storage product that went live in April, and an analytics product is currently in development. Rother says it will be integrated with all data sources which will be essential for faster insights and out-of-the-box data governance.
The $7 million seed round
The Germany-based company recently closed a very hot seed round securing over $7 million, co-led by HV Capital and 1kx. Steered by a founding team with strong track records, Impossible Cloud claims to pull “critical benefits of web3” for B2B customers, while remaining on a fiat-based payment system, according to the release. Jan Miczaika, a partner at one of the leading investors from the seed round HV Capital, believes the company is a cloud-computing market disruptor.
“By entering the market with an enterprise-grade cloud storage ecosystem leveraging web3 technology, the company’s business model delivers the critical benefits of web3 for the enterprise cloud market,” he stated in the release, adding that the founding team’s history of forming and scaling successful businesses show strong promise for actualizing the company’s vision.
A founding partner from the other leading investor 1kx, Lasse Clausen, said that his firm believes "decentralization can breed resilience and antifragility in large-scale software networks.” Impossible Cloud also received a strategic investment from Protocol Labs Ventures, an open-source R&D Lab, and the company’s investment lead Brad Holden reiterated the strong founding leadership as a marker for success in meeting “the market demands head-on.”
Rother explained that the company saw three key problems when it came to cloud storage and data management: public storage is too expensive with too many hidden fees, the centralized architecture creates single-point-of-failure risks, and the scaling process is too complicated and expensive. “Our solution is designed to never lose data or go down — 100% durability — and is resilient to any one component of the system failing,” he said. Even if one node fails or is in need of maintenance, the system can continue to operate effectively, prompting the company’s service level agreements (SLAs) to guarantee 99.95% availability.
Rother also touts that the company exceeds industry standards with proprietary orchestration and security software layer providing triple encryption, Microsoft multi-factor authentication (MFA); and cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), “an important security feature that helps prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and other types of malicious activity.”
Bringing the ‘impossible’ to cloud markets
Currently, Impossible Cloud’s focus is on making it as easy as possible for partner networks to work with them in Europe and the U.S. — the latter being a slightly more complicated market to tap into according to Rother.
“Our route to market, especially in the U.S., [is] to work with the market-leading companies, convince them that this is the better cloud product, and to make it available through them to the end customer. This is very important to us in the U.S.” where regulation issues like data residency and sovereignty as well as compliance present extra challenges for a decentralized cloud company. In Europe “it’s a bit of a different story” because it is already a European company with GDPR-compliant regulations and data centers, he added.
Rother also emphasized a growing demand for edge and low-latency services. “With our decentralized architecture, we have data centers that are very close to the edge, where the customer is needing storage and compute, [and] we can support them with very high performance,” he explained.
To continue meeting the rising demand, the company is looking to offer geofences — a location-based technology that can help with regulation issues such as data location compliance as well as high performance at the edge. Currently, the company’s geofencing service is only available in Europe. Impossible Cloud also plans to develop a content delivery network (CDN) product.
“Our infrastructure will be well suited to CDN use cases because we can leverage our geographically distributed network of servers to cache content close to end users anywhere in the world. Legacy vendors often feature overly complex pricing schemes, vendor-lock ins or inefficiencies from underutilized infrastructure,” he explained.
Impossible Cloud faces a long line of competitors including Wasabi, Backblaze, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Microsoft Azure Blob storage, Google Cloud Storage, Sia, and more. But Rother claims the decentralized enterprise-grade infrastructure combined with the company’s data storage algorithms differentiates Impossible Cloud from the herd.