Left Lane Capital and Origin Ventures co-lead our Series A, alongside existing investors Royal Street Ventures, Carthona Capital, and Kickstart Fund.
As Salad enters its fourth year, we’re proud to have hundreds of thousands of PC gamers and an incredible lineup of investors joining us in our mission to build a Community Cloud for the next generation of the web.
The Salad network has already become one of the most powerful multi-purpose distributed supercomputers in the world. In a few months’ time, SaladCloud’s first enterprise workloads will help us illustrate just how computesharing can provide affordable, distributed alternatives to traditional cloud solutions—which is something far more necessary than ever before.
A Decade of Innovation
There’s an exciting and determinative decade ahead of us. Private individuals are exploring digital sovereignty with crypto, Web3, and the emerging metaverse. Our lives are becoming more connected, and market analysts breathlessly anticipate billions more IoT devices, mobile phones, and people coming online by 2025. Some of the biggest names in gaming, tech, and social media are looking for a more immersive future powered by machine learning, artificial intelligence, and individual creativity.
Connecting those dots will take a near-ubiquitous supply of compute resources—and with data demand already surging at an exponential rate, it’s become painfully obvious that Web3 will present an insuperable challenge for the centralized cloud.
Today, more than half of all available compute resources sit idle within our own homes, locked inside gaming rigs or other performance PCs. As our lives become further entwined with digital experiences, latent consumer resources like storage, bandwidth, and compute cycles could become the precious commodities of the 21st century.
To power all of the digital venues, technical milestones, and decentralized economies of Web3, we’ve got to awaken the world’s Internet-enabled devices to their true potential.
Salad will empower millions of individuals to unlock the hidden value of their compute resources.
The Power of Computesharing
When I see nearly 50,000 gamers chatting in our community Discord server, it’s almost easy to forget just how radical Salad’s value proposition still is today.
In 2018, you could hardly convince one person to share their PC to a distributed network, let alone a hundred. It’s humbling to realize that, nowadays, hundreds of thousands of individuals—from 188 different countries!—voluntarily share compute resources on Salad every month. Thanks to their contributions, our network has attained activity peaks of 80+ petaFLOPS.
Salad is the world’s most distributed supercomputer! It’s an amazing feat, but our hodge-podge Kitchen would be nothing without the visionary Salad Chefs who took a chance on us.
We’re forever indebted to the visionary early adopters who took the first bite, along with the hundreds of YouTubers and content creators who have shared the warmth of our Kitchen since the beginning. You’ve put the social proof in the pudding and given the whole world a taste of what our community can do.
Since our founding, Salad Chefs like you have contributed 8,000+ years of processing cycles to Ethereum and dozens of other cryptocurrency networks. Gamers in our community annually claim over 3 million games, subscriptions, gift cards, and other digital rewards using just the power of their PCs. You’ve joined us in donating thousands to environmental charities like 1% for the Planet and #TeamTrees. And in four years of service, no one has ever suffered a security intrusion or incurred hardware damage while using our software.
Your trust has given us the chance to prove that computesharing works. We’re excited to help you profit from your PC for years to come.
Our Series A Partners
I’d also like to extend heartfelt thanks to our new and returning investment partners.
- To our partners at Royal Street Ventures, Carthona Capital, and Kickstart Fund: We could not have reached this point without your wisdom and your resolve. You’ve witnessed gut-wrenching ups and downs during four years of volatility, and never once compromised your remarkable long-term faith in our company trajectory.
- To our partners at Left Lane Capital: It is my privilege to welcome you to the Kitchen. You understood our mission to change our relationship with the web, and your insightful analysis on our business model, community, and market fit has already lent clarity to our vision.
- To our partners at Origin Ventures: Thank you for recognizing that computesharing is the inevitable future of the web. Your years of experience and incredible track record of building new marketplaces will be an invaluable asset as we continue to develop the SaladCloud platform.
Your support is an essential ingredient in our recipe, and we look forward to sharing all our future achievements with you. With a thriving community and powerhouse partners like you on our side, Salad is uniquely provisioned to address the growing appetite for elastic compute resources, and enable private individuals to directly compete with traditional cloud providers.
“We are at peak centralization right now. As computing becomes embedded everywhere in our world, transforming how we interact with people, places, and things, and as the physical and digital worlds converge, we will require more sovereignty and more decentralized control. Cloud and edge computing will evolve to meet these real-world needs.”
— Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft (Source)
Why We Chop
This is a fight against Centralization itself—and we couldn’t have picked a more opportune moment to enter the fray.
Enterprise-standard cloud technologies have already begun to mingle with consumer operating systems, while native compatibility layers such as WSL2 open additional vectors for distributed applications. Thanks to developments like these, SaladCloud will provide an extensible and ideal compute environment in which to delimit entirely new Web3 protocols. Our people-powered platform will help tomorrow’s big thinkers realize unsung ideas in a way that’s easy, transparent, and far more affordable than the incumbent cloud computing solutions.
Since 2020’s seed plus round, our engineering team has been hard at work developing SaladBowl, a proprietary orchestration engine that allows us to distribute workloads to select cohorts of virtual and physical machines across a standardized infrastructure layer.
One day soon, Salad Chefs will get the chance to opt into ephemeral edge-computing jobs, run embarrassingly parallelizable AI algorithms, or even share bandwidth to support some of the world’s most popular VPN services—safely, and on their own terms.
The Future We Share
No matter what the future holds, I believe some things will always remain true. For starters:
- Every commonly held idea begins as an experiment.
- You can’t get anywhere great on a well-worn path.
- Nourishing good ideas early is the key to innovation.
In that vein, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve officially signed contracts with our first enterprise clients. Over the next few months, we’ll begin to onboard them onto our flagship SaladCloud services and devise ways to incorporate their new, non-crypto workloads into Salad’s menu of computational cuisine. Gamers using Salad will soon be able to choose between all-new SaladCloud jobs or classic cryptomining tasks whenever they Chop.
It’s been a journey to get to this point, and for any Salad Chef rolling their eyes, let me assure you: this thing is inked! We can’t divulge any more details just yet, but we’re stoked to introduce you to all-new workloads later this year.
Happy Chopping,
Bob Miles, Salad CEO
We’re growing our team! If you’re keen to apply to Salad, feel free to read about our company culture and browse available positions on our Careers page. To learn more about our elastic and affordable cloud services, please visit the SaladCloud page for information on contacting our enterprise client liaisons.
