Start-Up Profile: Salvobit

HQs
Sofia, Bulgaria

Date founded
December 2017

Financial funding
So far personal funds and planning crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter starting at the end of April 2018, and then looking for investors in the future

Revenue
No revenue as firm is in the final development stage of the product

Co-founders

Ivan Georgiev, CTO, has 25 years of experience including design, implementation and leadership of large system software projects while working for some of big players in the industry, with multiple patented inventions that have been used in production systems in finance, military and other critical applications, being the inventor of the technologies in the Salvobit product and leading their implementation; was principal architect at Citrix and VP engineering at Sanbolic.

Peter Donov, VP of infrastructure worked over 16 years of system, application programming experience and in highly available clustered file systems, being responsible at Salvobit for cryptography algorithm implementation, P2P networking, security subsystem and GUI back-end; was also formerly at Citrix and Sanbolic.

Kiril Grancharov, VP of web development, has more than 10 years of experience as full stack web developer as well as automation control systems engineer; worked on multiple projects including energy management systems, data analysis systems and small embedded systems; is responsible for developing and maintaining all web related technologies in the company, both front-end and back-end; formerly at Citrix.

Number of employees
6

Technology
Secure peer-to-peer software for file sharing; storage; AES 256 encryption; private key kept by the user and none else having access to it

Product description
Salvobit Share allows to establish your own secure sharing network through which you can safely transfer and store data, using your own hardware from PCs to high-end servers. Data is stored on user’s own hardware. It supports OS X, Windows, Linux Debian and Fedora. The incorporated caching system, which allows fast working speed between the remote locations, improves the workflow.

Released date
Late autumn 2018

Price range
The basic package, which offers all the security features and technologies is for free. Licenses ranging $100+ offer additional data management functionalities.

Roadmap

2Q18: alpha testing, friends and family testing, crowdfunding campaign
3Q18: closed beta testing
4Q18: release of version 1.0 of the product

Partners
No one at the moment

Distribution
Download from the official site; other options to be specified in the future

Number of customers
No one up to now

Customers targeted
Individuals (age 18+) and enterprises in USA, Europe and Asia

Competitors
Dropbox, Resilio (spun out of BitTorrent), Tresorit, Syncthing, Scramble

Comments

Obviously, it will be a miracle if the company succeeds. Why?

The brand name of the tiny company is unknown, a handicap on the consumer and enterprise market, and it costs a lot in marketing to be recognized worldwide.

With crowdfunding, you cannot get the several millions of dollars most of storage start-ups need to begin.

The technology is attractive but other competitors already get it.

Who is going to trust a company form Eastern Europe to protect sensible or critical data, even if it's a member of the European Union?

It has no presence in USA, a necessity for any storage firm.

Bozhidar Bakev from Salvobit answers to this comment:
"Crowdfunding is just the second step of our fundraising plan. We have used personal funds so far and after the crowdfunding campaign and the official release of the product we will go for investors. We are doing this, so we can go to the investors with a functioning product, which is much better than just an idea or a product in beta testing. Besides, the crowdfunding campaign we are planning is not only for raising money, but also for gaining some additional popularity.

It doesn’t matter that the technical team is situated in Eastern Europe, we already have a company in the USA. And one more important thing. Our technology is developed in such a way that we have absolutely no access to the customers data. How is that possible? As we have said before the data is stored on the customers’ hardware and our security technology, Cryptofence, is open source, so everyone can see what is going on."