Acurast Secures $5.4M to Turn Idle Smartphones into Decentralized Cloud Powerhouses

Your phone’s sleeping—Acurast just woke it up with a $5.4M war chest. The startup’s betting big on repurposing idle smartphones into a decentralized cloud network, cutting out Big Tech’s iron grip on server farms.

No more AWS oligopoly? The pitch: harness the 1.5 billion smartphones gathering dust in drawers worldwide. (Take that, Wall Street—your data centers just got outflanked by a bunch of recycled Galaxies.)

One investor’s ’visionary play’ is another’s desperate pivot from Web3’s NFT hangover. Either way, the cloud just got a whole lot more interesting—and a little more anarchic.

Decentralized cloud is gaining traction

Acurast has surpassed 72,000 smartphones, which have enabled 256 million transactions so far. According to the company, this makes it the most decentralized computing network today.

“The ACU token lies at the heart of this economy. Acurast allows anyone and everyone to run compute with their mobile phones, providing real decentralisation, and become stakeholders in the network powering a secure, scalable and decentralised computer economy while incentivising active collaboration and sustainable growth,” Alessandro De Carli.

Traditionally, cloud computing is dominated by big tech firms like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. These companies invest billions in global data centers and sell their services to online platforms.

By contrast, decentralized cloud solutions rely on distributed networks of servers—sometimes including personal devices, as in Acurast’s model. This allows users to tap into the idle computing power of their devices in exchange for rewards.