French Start-Up Cozy Cloud Raised €4 Million

Cozy Cloud SAS, based in Puteaux, France, just raised €4 million including €3 million from MAIF and €1 million from Innovacom.

In 2014, the start-up already got €800,000 in investments from Seed4Soft’s business angels and Innovacom.

The company was co-founded in Novembre 2012 by CEO Benjamin André (picture), coming from Total, and CTO Frank Rousseau.

In March 2015, they were joined by chief product officer Tristan Nitot, former president of Mozilla Europe.

While self-hosted, extensible, open source, private cloud platform Cozy offers native apps for managing common tasks like sharing files, synchronizing photos, managing calendars, and working with emails, it is built to aggregate, manage, and analyze personal data coming from multiple sources and services. This functionality has the potential to transform Cozy from a personal cloud server to a platform for storing and working with personal data.

It has the ability to aggregate the user’s personal data from various sources and services using connectors. For example, using a dedicated connector, Cozy can acquire and process banking data and help the user to manage their personal finances.

Cozy is offering a solution for virtual private server providers and cloud-enabled storage appliances. It will also serve as an alternative to proprietary services for mobile operating systems like Firefox OS and CyanogenMod.

V1.0 of Cozy Cloud was released in November 2013 and V2.0 in June 2015. Final release of the product is expected for the end of 2016.

Four hosting companies, OVH, Scaleway, SWHosting et Netcup offer the installation of Cozy since February 2016.

Target audience

Users looking for a simple, adaptable, and powerful self-hosted platform that makes it possible to perform common tasks like sharing and synchronizing files and photos, managing calendars and contacts, working with email, etc. This also includes privacy-conscious users interested in alternatives to popular third-party services and web apps. Together, these users act as facilitators that introduce Cozy to a wider non-technical audience of friends and family members.
Developers and hackers interested in using Cozy as a platform for building apps and connectors.

Roadmap