Rapidly growing company, led by serial entrepreneur, David Gurlé, completes seed round – led by Global Ventures, a leading VC firm in MENA – with participation from Inria, OneRagtime, Mi8, and business angels
$800 billion cloud market, growing at 20% a year – amid accelerated demand for AI – is ripe for a European solution to lessen dependence on U.S. Cloud providers
Cannes, France – PoliCloud (the “Company”), the rapidly-growing provider and developer of next-gen, sovereign, High Performance Computing (HPC) cloud infrastructure, announces its €7.5 million seed fundraise.
The funding was led by Global Ventures, a leading VC firm in MENA, with participation from MI8 Limited, a Hong Kong multi-family office; OneRagtime, a Paris-based venture capital firm; Inria, France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology; and other private investors.
The proceeds will be used to hire the operating team and grow its business globally with a focus on public entities in Europe.
PoliCloud provides state-of-the-art distributed cloud infrastructure for secure storage and HPC. The Company’s solution is eco-responsible, affordable, abundant, and secure; meets the sovereignty needs of enterprises, public administrations and local SMEs; is at the edge because of its unique capabilities of providing decentralization of computing through its partnership with Hivenet, the distributed cloud leader and owner of the market’s largest contributor community.
PoliCloud is responding to demand following relentless (c. 20% annually) global cloud growth. Accelerated demand for AI requires affordable and scalable computing power, and the market is ripe for a Europe-led solution to lessen dependence on U.S. cloud providers, who currently dominate the $800 billion market.
David Gurlé, Founder of PoliCloud, said:
“PoliCloud is meeting a critical market demand for sovereign cloud infrastructure that is not only secure and abundant but also eco-responsible. Our unique edge computing capabilities deliver significant benefits to both public and private sector users.
“The time is right for a new European solution that reduces reliance on US cloud providers and offers affordable, scalable computing power, especially as AI adoption accelerates. We are grateful to Global Ventures and all our investors for their support as we enter this exciting phase of expansion.”
PoliCloud is a solution addressing market imperfections. Current cloud expansion suffers from high usage costs and dependence on hyperscalers – such as Google or Amazon – whose models use massive, single, centralized data facilities with high implementation costs and challenging environmental conditions. In contrast, PoliCloud has multiple competitive advantages, including:
- Unlimited and flexible computing power, provided by federating with the Grid. By y/e 2025, it will have >1,000+ GPUs and by y/e 2026 >20,000+ GPUs;
- Computing resources are delivered to where they are needed and empower local communities;
- Small footprint and energy needs;
- Rapid time to market, with flexibility and adaptability;
- Capex and Opex offset by sharing unused capacity; and
- More resilient, higher performance, and more scalable by design
PoliCloud’s operating model combines its hardware and infrastructure with Hivenet’s distributed storage and computing software. PoliCloud designs, builds, and operates its own computers and micro-data centers, with proprietary and optimized design, to ensure low-cost, high-performance storage and computing on state-of-the-art hardware.
For example, cities such as Cannes, France, purchase, host, and supply PoliClouds with electricity and fiber connection, and offer the available capacity to its ecosystem of startups in their incubator. Enterprises, such as Data Factory, provide HPC infrastructure to their customers in the US. The result is reliable and scalable cloud storage for public and private users.
PoliCloud was launched in February 2025 at the World Artificial Intelligence Cannes Festival (WAICF) with support from the five cities of the Alpes-Maritimes. The Company also benefits from a positive market context and political environment, as well as buoyant early trading. Having already sold four PoliClouds in three months, with a projected €6+ million in revenue by year-end 2025, the Company is already cash flow positive.
The current cloud computing market is worth $800 billion and is projected to reach $2 trillion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs Research. Profitability pressure is shifting the market to frugality, and there is a need for cost-effective GPU-based computing, such as HPC for rapid rendering graphics. SMEs are rapidly growing and adopting AI, catalysing a major market need for computing power that requires fulfillment. France’s public investment bank, Bpifrance, also considers the development of distributed computer technology as a deep-tech initiative.
Simon Sharp, Senior Partner of Global Ventures, commented:
“Global Ventures is delighted to lead PoliCloud’s seed fund raise and work again with David and his talented management team, following their track record of successful delivery in Hivenet. We seek visionary entrepreneurs whose products have clear market demand and global potential – all of which apply to PoliCloud. Their distributed data centers have multiple competitive advantages: delivering next-gen, sovereign computing resources where they are needed; with more resilience; faster performance; greater security; while being cheaper to build and maintain. The exponential growth in AI demand and the need for reliable, scalable computing power means the Company’s future is a very bright one.”
Stephanie Hospital, Founder & CEO of OneRagtime, said:
“As an early investor and believer in David and Hivenet; and being very aware of how cloud technology has opened up horizons of innovation, but also comes with challenges of costs, security and environmental impact, OneRagtime is excited to invest in PoliCloud. The company is uniquely positioned to provide decentralized, unlimited computing power – affordably, securely and in an eco-responsible way – for which substantial demand exists.”
Bruno Sportisse, CEO of Inria, commented:
“Inria Participations is delighted to become an investor in Policloud, as it is a logical extension of Inria’s existing strategic partnership with Hivenet. Inria and PoliCloud share the same philosophy of a decentralized path to the cloud, for secure, distributed computing, but where resources can also be shared according to need. Achieving this goal is of strategic importance for France and its digital sovereignty.”
Guillaume Dhamelincourt, Managing Director of Mi8, said:
“The opportunity to invest in PoliCloud was compelling for Mi8, as the world embraces AI and rapidly adjusts its demand for computing power. The multiple use cases for PoliClouds, such as SMEs – but also public enterprises who want to stay mindful of their IT strategy’s impact- is an attractive market environment and we look forward to PoliCloud’s future growth with great confidence.”
About PoliCloud
PoliCloud is a decentralized cloud built for cities, enterprises, and public institutions that refuse to hand their data to hyperscalers. Each unit arrives as a container-sized module that runs compute and storage locally while linking to a wider network.
Sovereignty — Data remains under local regulation, free from foreign interference.
Security — End-to-end encryption and live intrusion protection keep workloads safe and always on.
Sustainability — Air-cooled design cuts energy use and eliminates water waste, offering a cloud that respects the planet.
Scalability — Snap in new modules when you need extra power; the fabric pools capacity automatically for AI, research, and everyday services.
About Hivenet
Hivenet is a distributed cloud platform that replaces traditional data centers with crowdsourced infrastructure.
People use Hivenet to back up files, run computing tasks, and send large files—powered entirely by idle devices across the globe. It’s fast, fair, and radically more sustainable than the status quo. No extraction. No vendor lock-in. Just cloud services that actually live up to the name.