Seal
Seal Storage is a carbon-neutral, enterprise-grade, blockchain cloud storage platform.
Website: https://www.sealstorage.io/
HQ: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Active Markets: North America
Problem Addressed
Centralized data storage faces a number of challenges. Storage facilities require large data centers, are expensive to operate, can be difficult to access, and are susceptible to security breaches as a single point of failure. Cloud storage services demand is expected to continue growing as supply struggles to keep up with demand. Within the context of research organizations and universities, Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) cannot access necessary data to participate in scientific investigation.
Project Description
Seal develops decentralized cloud storage infrastructure for a variety of enterprise, university, research institute, and Web3 firm use cases. The project leverages the Filecoin network to globally distribute stored data. Seal’s solution is an onramp for organizations to easily access the Filecoin network’s decentralized Web3 cloud storage. Centers storing data through the Seal platform are powered by renewable energy.
Business Data
Status: Active
Constituency Served: researchers, enterprises, universities
Networks: Filecoin
Known Investors: Metaplanet Holdings
Additional References: N/A
Progress to date
Seal is one of the first providers of NFT and archival data storage at the enterprise and institutional level. The World Economic Forum named Seal 2023 Technology Pioneer. WEF identifies promising early stage companies through this program that show commitment towards creating impact in the business space as well as for society as a whole. Seal’s partnership with the National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) democratized access to research data through their decentralized storage infrastructure, increasing accessibility for MSI’s and other communities experiencing friction accessing data for scientific investigation.
Seal is developing a public dashboard that will facilitate accountability to the project’s ESG standards and goals.
Business Model
Seal charges market-driven fees for storage services.
Traction
Seal has secured a number of impressive partnerships and clients since launching. In partnership with UC Berkeley, Seal provided the decentralized cloud storage for neutrino physics research. Berkeley. Storing large research data sets on decentralized infrastructure finds benefits in security, cost, and accessibility. The ATLAS experiment, a general-purpose particle physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), chose Seal for archival data storage services. Starling Lab is using Seal to store documentation of human history, such as human rights violations, war crimes, and testimony of genocide. And at the University of Utah, researchers are using Seal to store earth sciences and climate data for their Center for Extreme Data Management Analysis and Visualization (CEDMAV). As of February 2024, Seal Storage had uploaded over 200 terabytes of atmospheric data.