SAN FRANCISCO. December 2023 - UltiHash, the first high-performance and sustainable data storage solution, is announcing it has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding. The round was led by Inventure, with participation from PreSeedVentures, Tiny VC, Futuristic VC, The Nordic Web, Antti Karjalainen, Founder, and angel scout for Sequoia Capital, and other private investors.
UltiHash is entering a market where data growth is skyrocketing, and the environment is being taxed for the fuel. According to IDC’s Data Storage 2025 report, digital data is expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025 with an annual growth rate of 19.2% from 2020 (and each of those zettabytes generates the carbon emissions of roughly two million people every year). This rising tide of data will lift only the boats with the data storage to facilitate high-performance applications like process optimization and product development.
Existing storage solutions often force a compromise between high-cost and low-performance, which causes acceleration to become almost impossibly cost-prohibitive. This is a particular challenge for companies working in hybrid cloud infrastructures, where data transfer rates and multi-vendor setups increase complexity. The impact of data goes beyond the business world. Data is drowning more and more of the world’s resources, so UltiHash is cutting down on the environmental toll of data growth by reducing the overall amount of data that needs to be preserved.
To shake up the existing paradigms around data storage, UltiHash facilitates data growth without the need for a proportional storage capacity increase. Its technology brings byte-level deduplication independent of data types to every data infrastructure matching binary fragments per and across datasets from terabytes to exabytes. UltiHash’s technology is able to decrease companies’ storage needs by up to 50%, helping them save millions on unnecessary storage and network costs; users only store and migrate the data they truly need without compromising speed, thus, breaking the logjam between scalability and affordability that companies face when expanding their data operations.
By condensing the amount of data stored, UltiHash advances the growth of high-performance data-driven applications, such as machine learning models and AI, business intelligence, product engineering, and more, in a sustainable and cost-effective way. Every byte is fully utilized, and the environmental impact is kept at an absolute minimum.
Rebecka Löthman Rydå, Investor at Inventure, added, “We live in a world where the exponential growth of data is looked at as the new oil, but just like oil the negative environmental impacts are becoming substantial. UltiHash leads a tectonic shift in sustainable data storage with a solution able to eliminate unnecessary data and highly increase efficiency in your data operations. We are proud to back this ambitious team and support this shift.”
"The exponential increase in data storage resources is not sustainable from either a business or environmental perspective,” said Tom Lüdersdorf, UltiHash Co-Founder and CEO. “Resource optimization is the only way forward to manage data growth and continuously use data as the lever to solve challenges. In this industry, speed is a must, and we’re here to make hot storage resource-efficient.”
Tom Lüdersdorf, a Berlin-based entrepreneur and the mind behind UltiHash, embarked on this venture in 2022, building upon five years of rich entrepreneurial experience. His passion lies in the ever-evolving landscape of innovation and harnessing these advancements to positively impact the world. At UltiHash, he's turning the dream of sustainable data growth into a reality. A true people-first leader, Tom excels in cultivating a team culture grounded in hard work, trust, and respect. His dedication extends beyond achieving UltiHash's goals; he is actively committed to assembling a diverse team, believing it to be not just an objective but the cornerstone of the company's success.
Katja Belova, CTO of UltiHash, is an experienced technical leader who is always looking to bring users’ perspectives into massive data storage problems. Katja joined Ultihash after working with massive amounts of data as the leader of the engineering team ResearchGate. She filed her first software patent at 21- years old and went on to spend 16 years working in tech, with the last decade being dedicated to Big Data, specializing in data platforms.