File storage is a painfully fragmented and proprietary problem area with enormous lock-in risk. Spacedrive promises to dramatically simplify and transform this market by delivering infra-neutral user freedoms and innovation levels like never before seen. OSS Capital is highly honored to lead this founding seed alongside over half a dozen phenomenal open source founders and builders who have gone from zero to many billion + outcomes!

- Joseph Jacks, OSS Capital

I'm fascinated with data storage. I have preserved my life and creative work since I was a small child. Capturing tens of thousands of memories, keeping project files and leaving a disorganized trail of screenshots, recordings and memes behind me for nearly two a decades.

My dream has long been to organize it all — problem is, no one cloud service or app has ever met my needs. Leading to the realization that today's data infrastructure is almost entirely dependent on the cloud. In reality not everything belongs in the cloud, or one particular cloud. Some files are just too big, others are too sensitive. Sometimes we even forget which cloud, hard drive or device has a file we need.

54.62% of people use at least 3 different cloud services, and more than half are deeply concerned about data loss and privacy according to a study conducted by GoodFirms Research in 2021.

This could be fixed with a shift in architecture. It got me thinking, what if we took the best tools from the cloud and put them on your devices... and made it open source. Cloud service providers would become just storage silos and you would become the central source of truth for your data.

I pictured an app, shaped like a file explorer but packed with tech you've certainly never seen in one before. I called it Spacedrive.

Imagine if all file management happened virtually; your laptop, smartphone, external drives and cloud accounts could pool together to form a single filesystem. Spacedrive accomplishes this using a decentralized database that securely synchronizes folder structures and file metadata between your devices in realtime. It uses content addressable storage to identify files via their "fingerprint" so that duplicates can be tracked and managed and folders can contain files from several storage locations.

You could ensure redundancy to prevent data loss, create photo albums that are OS/cloud agnostic, automate routines, search offline devices and drives. You could even generate highly compressed thumbnails and preview media automatically. The possibilities are vast.

Spacedrive is decentralized, each device is a node in your personal network. Our business will provide the software as an optional service. A cloud instance of Spacedrive is just another node. It will provide encrypted database backup, simple file sharing, public hosted libraries and more. No core features will be restricted behind a paywall and our architecture deliberately prioritizes privacy, ownership and freedom.

Last month I open sourced the repo on GitHub, I was not previously aware repositories could go viral on their own, until mine did. Spacedrive sat at #1 on trending worldwide for three days, swiftly surpassing 10k stars. It reached the front page of Hacker News, not once, but twice (maybe a little prematurely). Turns out the concept struck a chord with a lot of people.

With Joseph Jacks from OSS Capital leading our $2m funding round, we have an incredible array of angel investors participating alongside. AngelList Co-Founder Naval Ravikant, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke, GitHub Co-Founder Tom Preston-Werner, Co-Creator of Apache Kafka Neha Narkhede, Head of Edge Infrastructure at Equinix Zachary Smith, CEO of Alluxio Haoyuan Li (who wrote the paper on the Virtual Distributed File System in which Spacedrive is loosely based), BloomTech CEO Austen Allred, former VP of Sales at Elasticsearch Justin Hoffman, former VMware COO Sanjay Poonen, Cal.com CEO Peer Richelsen and more.

With some of the greatest minds in technology backing us and a large community passionate for our vision we're positioned to make a sizable impact on the way we handle our most valuable personal data.

Follow @spacedriveapp on Twitter for updates and join the waitlist to be one of the first to try the beta. We're also hiring, 3 full-time remote positions available with equity offerings.

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Spacedrive

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Spacedrive raises $2m to build an open source, cross platform file manager