Salad.com Announces $17 Million Series A Funding Round to Pioneer Affordable Decentralized Cloud Computing Services

The funds will bolster Salad's efforts to facilitate Web3 innovation and service exponential data demand through peer-to-peer #computesharing

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, April 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Salad, a compute-sharing network where gamers and everyday people exchange idle compute resources for rewards, today announced a $17 million Series A funding round to scale its cloud infrastructure and develop a new enterprise vertical for Web3 innovators. The round was led by Left Lane Capital and Origin Ventures with participation from Kickstart Seed Fund, Royal Street Ventures and Carthona Capital.

With one million downloads, 30,000 daily active nodes, and 100 PetaFLOPS peak processing power across its distributed network, Salad is disrupting the conventional cloud services marketplace with a decentralized alternative powered by the world's idle gaming PCs. Exponential demand is radically outpacing the existing supply of commercially-available compute resources, the world is at peak centralization and the future web will be powered by millions of individuals around the globe. Salad has spent the past four years onboarding latent consumer-grade supply by incentivizing gamers to share computing resources, create a more equitable Internet, and power Salad's workload-agnostic cloud services platform.

With 2.8 billion gamers worldwide, Salad has made substantial inroads in addressing an untapped supply of powerful consumer resources. The open-source Salad desktop application invites gamers to share storage, bandwidth and compute-cycles from their idle PCs securely and voluntarily. To encourage user contributions that power various high-performance computing tasks, Salad offers network participants meaningful rewards based on the amount of resources shared. To date, Salad's dedicated community of "Salad Chefs" has contributed over 8,000 years of processing uptime to support the Ethereum network and other blockchain ecosystems.

"Computesharing is the catalyst for everything Web3 should be. At Salad, we're building a future where millions of individuals can collaborate to achieve new technological milestones, and use the power of personal devices to compete directly with centralized cloud providers," said Bob Miles, Founder and CEO of Salad Technologies. "With the help of thousands of Salad Chefs from across the world, our distributed network has already surpassed some of the world's top data centers. This raise validates our mission to decentralize the cloud, and will make the world's largest computing resource accessible to thousands more cloud customers and businesses."

Having accomplished 10X network growth in 2021, Salad will use this latest funding round to expand its engineering team and accelerate the development of the SaladCloud platform. A new marketplace vertical will allow third-party enterprises to access and scale using Salad's affordable, computesharing-powered cloud services.

"The Salad network is an incredibly unique asset. Proof of work mining has supplied the network a passive income generation stream and Salad is now targeting more specialized, discrete workloads with its powerful computing network. Salad's core offering should appeal to any enterprise clients seeking affordable, elastic cloud solutions. We're looking forward to supporting the Salad team as they and their volunteer community come together to build the world's largest distributed data center," said Derek Urben at Left Lane Capital.

"The future of cloud computing includes individually-owned resources networked together. We're excited to support a team of innovators, engineers, and futurists dedicated to delivering a first-of-its-kind cloud solution," added Brent Hill, Managing Partner at Origin Ventures.

Salad will scale its team from 20 to 70 within the year, focusing primarily on expanding its engineering department, but also seeking to enlist business development experts to help research, identify and onboard more enterprise customers for the SaladCloud distributed cloud services platform. Benjy Boxer, CEO & Co-Founder of Parsec, will also join Salad's board of directors to provide growth strategy counsel.

To learn more, please visit us at Salad.com.

About Salad Technologies
Salad Technologies is building a multi-purpose and entirely people-powered cloud computing platform. In a world where 400M powerful gaming PCs sit inactive for most of the day, Salad's open-source desktop application empowers individuals to earn meaningful rewards from their privately owned hardware. Salad users contribute latent compute resources—like processing cycles and bandwidth—to support third-party workloads on a distributed network, where they redeem millions of games, gift cards, subscriptions, and other digital rewards every year. Salad is the easiest and most trusted way to computeshare.

With thousands of everyday webizens using Salad in 188 countries, the Salad computesharing network has fast become the world's most distributed supercomputer. Salad now aims to disrupt the centralized cloud market by offering comparable, decentralized compute solutions at a fraction of the cost. The SaladCloud platform will soon power cryptomining pools, P2P gaming, VPN services, data synth deep learning, AI modeling, and anything else that takes hard crunching.

About Left Lane Capital:
Left Lane Capital is a leading New York-based global growth-equity firm investing in high-growth internet and consumer technology companies. Left Lane's mission is to partner with extraordinary entrepreneurs creating category-defining businesses fundamental to the human condition and spirit. Previous investments include GoStudent, Masterworks, M1 Finance, Tovala, FightCamp, Wayflyer, Tapcart, and more. For more information, please visit www.leftlanecap.com.

About Origin Ventures:
Origin Ventures is a leading early-stage venture capital firm investing in the Digital Native Economy. The firm invests in elite teams building high-growth software, marketplace, and consumer companies defining how Millennial and Gen Z generations live, work, and play. Previous investments include Cameo, Veho, BacklotCars, Fountain, 15Five, Tock, Tovala, Blueboard, Grubhub, and many others. For more information, please visit www.originventures.com. 

Contact:
Avery O'Neil
2057479682
[email protected]

SOURCE Salad