Filecoin vets roll out distributed storage service on 'blockchain rails'

A group of Filecoin luminaries has raised $6.5 million to launch a compute agnostic distributed storage platform targeted at AI applications that will be free of egress fees, far more predictable on costs, and far more sovereign.

Akave styles itself as an enterprise cloud infrastructure company offering S3 compatible services. It describes its Akave Cloud service as enabling a “data lake that allows organizations to move data freely across AI and analytics platforms.” 

The service will run on the firm’s own Avalanche layer 1 blockchain. According to Akave, its architecture separates storage infrastructure providers from gateway endpoints, meaning customers can choose their gateway deployment without affecting the underlying node operators.

It operates its own peer to peer network of independent storage nodes connected by its own protocol. Objects are “broken into fragments, encrypted and erasure‑coded; fragments are spread across multiple nodes and jurisdictions.”

Its O3 orchestration layer exposes an S3 compatible API and manages metadata locally to customers’ preferred regions. Akave says it is effectively a drop-in replacement for existing cloud storage, and has built-in integrations for Snowflake and Apache Iceberg so companies don’t have to rearchitect their pipelines. It also supports connectors for Rclone, CloudMounter and DuckDB, Veeam, Acronis and more.

The platform includes an MCP server giving AI agents “direct access to storage buckets, reading, writing, and managing data through natural language.”

Because the network is peer‑to‑peer, it claims, “capacity can scale horizontally as new nodes join, without a central bottleneck, and S3 gateways can be spun up on‑demand in any location.”

Akave’s network encompasses multiple subnets, with Akave Cloud built on top on of one of these. “Enterprises can launch additional subnets in other regions over time to meet data‑sovereignty or performance requirements.”

NVMe‑enabled nodes can be deployed to handle latency‑sensitive workloads, it continues, with customers deciding where their data fragments live.

It describes the service as built on blockchain rails. “Every storage operation (create, modify, delete) is written to an immutable … giving users a verifiable audit trail of when and where data was stored,” the company told us. Though the ledger is for tracking metadata and auditability. 

“Tokens exist solely to calculate payouts to infrastructure providers on the backend,” it says. Customers pay in regular cash.

That cash amounts to $14.99 per TB per month. Put another way, by “Leveraging under‑utilised and shared infra from independent infrastructure providers” it reckons it can come in at 50 to 80 percent cheaper than hyperscalers.

But it points out that “Data fragments are stored on enterprise‑grade infrastructure; we prioritise NVMe‑enabled nodes within subnets for hot data workloads.” By contrast, other decentralized operators often run on consumer grade connections and underpowered devices, it claimed, leading to increased latency.

CEO Stefaan Vervaet was previously head of growth at Protocol Labs, the main backer of the Filecoin distributed storage network - and before that spent six years at Western Digital. CTO Angelo Schalley and CRO Daniel Leon are also Protocol Labs veterans.

The firm’s backers include Protocol Labs, No Limit Holdings, Blockchange, Lightshift, Blockchain Builders Fund, Big Brain Holdings, Avalanche Foundation, and the Filecoin Foundation. Between them they have ponied up $6m to support the company.