Infinit

Infinit, a Paris-based startup founded in 2012, developed a decentralized, peer-to-peer platform for file storage and transfer. The company was the brainchild of Julien Quintard, who served as CEO. His work on Infinit began as an extension of his Ph.D. thesis at the University of Cambridge, which focused on creating a storage system using the spare resources of a distributed network of computers.

The company's core product was a software-defined storage platform engineered to operate on any hardware, from commodity servers to virtual machines and containers. This technology allowed for the creation of scalable and fault-tolerant storage infrastructure tailored to specific applications. Infinit's platform distinguished itself with a truly decentralized architecture, avoiding the single points of failure inherent in traditional master/slave models. It offered a file transfer application that connected the sender's and recipient's computers directly via a peer-to-peer network, ensuring files were not stored on a central cloud. Security was a key feature, with end-to-end encryption making transfers private to the sender and recipient. For storage, the system broke files into encrypted chunks that were then distributed across the network, built on the premise that no single storage provider could be implicitly trusted.

Infinit's journey included participation in the Techstars accelerator program in New York, which helped it secure a $1.8M seed round in 2014, co-led by Alven Capital. The technology was aimed at developers and operators, providing interfaces for block, object, and file storage (such as NFS, SMB, and S3), and could be managed programmatically through APIs and command-line tools. This capability was particularly relevant for the burgeoning container ecosystem. The platform was designed to provide persistent storage for stateful applications, a significant challenge in containerized environments at the time. In December 2016, Docker Inc. acquired Infinit for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition was driven by Docker's need to offer a portable, distributed storage layer integrated with its container platform, addressing a frequent request from its user base. Following the acquisition, the Infinit team and its technology were integrated into Docker to enhance its storage capabilities for multi-container applications across any infrastructure.

Keywords: decentralized storage, peer-to-peer file transfer, software-defined storage, Docker acquisition, Julien Quintard, persistent storage for containers, distributed file system, end-to-end encryption, stateful applications, storage infrastructure, Alven Capital, Techstars alumni, fault-tolerant storage, P2P technology, storage virtualization, data privacy, container storage solutions, distributed systems research, cloudless file sharing, secure data transfer