Hive Cloud Secures $500,000 Seed Round

Hive Cloud Limited, creator of social network for file sharing, secured $500,000 seed financing.
 

The company plans to use the funding to build out the team based in San Francisco, CA and accelerate scaling of the platform to manage the global growth of the service.

The seed funding included participation of Bigcolors, Link11 GmbH, and private angel investors.

Hive, which officially came out of beta this week, is a social network for file sharing that flips the cloud storage upside down by focusing on the personal content discovery and sharing rather than the traditional pay-per-gigabyte model.

In contrast to other companies, which are ending unlimited storage, Hive offers free unlimited storage as well as the ability to share content within groups or lock content in private folders. Users can upload any type of file, including documents, photos, music, and video from their device or have Hive itself retrieve files for them, freeing their desktop storage.

Since its beta launch in October 2014, Hive has grown throughout the world and has been localized in English, French, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese with additional markets under development.

“We came out of the gate with a strong start and we are seeing markets around the world lighting up on a weekly basis. It is all product driven, which further validates that our vision of cloud storage is touching consumers in a unique way,” said Thierry Lehartel, Hive cofounder and CEO. “We want to build up on the momentum and pursue an aggressive growth plan, which will be initially fueled by the funding.

“We chose to partner with Bigcolors and Link11 GmbH, as companies that can advise in developing and driving the adoption of the Hive social network on a global basis. Hong-Kong-based Bigcolors has the experience and know-how to take Hive deeply into Asia and help with U.S. expansion, while German-based Link11 provides the backbone of the secure and scalable Hive cloud service.”