Cubbit and the EIC Accelerator: Home Cloud Turned Sovereign S3

Cubbit, a Bologna company founded in 2016, set out to replace the data centre with a swarm of small storage boxes in people's homes. Owners of a Cubbit Cell would get free, encrypted cloud storage; in return their spare disk space, processing power and bandwidth would be pooled and sold to small businesses as cloud services, at what the company called "half the market price". The European Commission selected the project, Community Cloud, in the 3 April 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, which lists Cubbit Srl as the project's only company. According to CORDIS, the EU contributed €1,918,750 towards total costs of €2,741,072.50, from 1 October 2019 to 30 September 2021.

Seven years later Cubbit still exists and still uses the technology it built then, but it sells something else. Its website now offers DS3 Cloud and DS3 Composer, "100% European object storage software" for enterprises and IT service providers, with no mention of a consumer device. Its filed accounts show revenue of €1,367,189 and a loss of €5,071,582 in 2024.

What Cubbit Does Today

Cubbit sells geo-distributed object storage that is compatible with Amazon's S3 interface. DS3 Cloud is a ready-made service hosted in partners' data centres; DS3 Composer is software that service providers and large companies install on their own hardware to run their own storage service, according to the company. The business is active: in 2026 Cubbit announced alliances with the Swiss integrator Ailanto in February, reported by StorageNewsletter, and with the Dutch host Worldstream in March, announced by Worldstream and Cubbit. In June 2026 it began working with the backup vendor Commvault, as Blocks and Files and Advanced Television reported, and in July 2026 the Ukrainian provider GigaCloud said it would run DS3 Composer across five data centres in Kyiv, Lviv and Warsaw, according to StorageNewsletter.

How many customers pay for this is stated only by the company and its investors. Cubbit said it had "over 350 business customers" when it raised money in July 2024, according to Bebeez and Startupbusiness; Blocks and Files put the figure at more than 400 enterprise customers in November 2025. Named users include the defence group Leonardo, Rai Way and the service provider WIIT, which are quoted on Cubbit's website.

How the Technology Works

Conventional cloud storage keeps copies of a file in one provider's data centres. Cubbit encrypts each file, cuts it into fragments, adds redundant fragments with Reed-Solomon coding and spreads them over many separate machines, so that any subset of a given size can rebuild the file. Its documentation describes a configuration of 20 data shards in 60 in total, where any 20 suffice, and a central "Coordinator" that tracks where fragments are but is "cryptographically blind" to their content. In 2021 TechTarget described an earlier scheme of 24 pieces expanded to 36, spread over 36 Cubbit Cells.

The difference from the EIC proposal is where the machines sit. The project, as CORDIS summarises it, rested on "the storage, CPU, and bandwidth provided by its users", with the home device doubling as a free consumer cloud. Today the nodes, which the documentation still calls Cells, can be physical boxes or virtual machines on a customer's own servers, and the commercial offer runs in data centres. Cubbit's pitch has moved from recycling household capacity to sovereignty: customers choose the countries where their fragments are stored, outside the reach of non-European cloud providers.

The EIC Project: Milestones Reported as Met

Community Cloud was Cubbit's second SME Instrument grant. A €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study ran from June to November 2018; its report says the consumer product had reached technology readiness level 7 and the business product level 6, and that Cubbit had joined the Techstars and Barclays accelerator in Tel Aviv. The Phase 2 project aimed to bring both products to level 9, the stage of full commercial readiness.

The final periodic report, covering January to September 2021, says that "despite the COVID-19 impact", which led the team to rethink the business product, "all the milestones were reached". It lists 5,000 Cubbit Cells sold, 500 business subscriptions sold, a Series A round "oversubscribed at €3.52M vs the original target of €1.8M", and both products at readiness level 9. The project ended on schedule on 30 September 2021.

Some of these figures can be checked against outside sources, and they do not all agree. TechTarget reported in July 2021, two months before the project ended, that 3,500 Cubbit Cells had been distributed in 70 countries, against the 5,000 sold in the company's report. The funding round is confirmed: Cubbit announced on its blog in July 2021 a €7 million round made of €3.5 million in equity, €2.4 million in convertible notes and €1.1 million in debt, figures repeated by Bebeez in 2024. The 500 business subscriptions could not be verified independently.

1. Business product at TRL 9 and on saleDeliveredS3 service sold to 200+ firms by 2023, per StorageNewsletter.
2. Series A roundDelivered€7M round, July 2021, incl. €3.5M equity.
3. 5,000 Cubbit Cells soldDisputedTechTarget counted 3,500 in July 2021.
4. Consumer cloud for mass commercialisationNot sustainedDevice no longer offered; users report the service was shut.
5. 500 business subscriptionsUnverifiedOnly the company's report.

What Happened to the Home Device

The consumer side was the engine of the funded model, and it is the part that did not last. CORDIS records that Cubbit's March 2019 crowdfunding campaign hit "+821% overfunding"; how much it raised is reported differently, with Bebeez citing more than €410,000 from Kickstarter and TechTarget $1.7 million across Kickstarter and Indiegogo. TechTarget listed the Cell at $341 for 512 GB and $588 for 4 TB.

Cubbit has published no announcement of the end of its consumer service that could be found for this article. Customer reviews on Trustpilot describe a forced migration from the consumer app, called Hatch, to DS3 from late 2023: one user in November 2023 wrote that the migration tool was too slow to move all data, another in December 2023 said 100 GB was lost, and a Cell owner wrote in July 2026, in Italian, that the company had shut the service down ("hanno dismesso il servizio"). These are individual accounts and could not be verified, but they agree with the company's own site, which no longer sells or mentions a consumer product.

The Money Since the Grant

After the EIC project, private investors carried Cubbit. In July 2024 it raised $12.5 million, given as €11.6 million, in a round co-led by the London investors LocalGlobe and ETF Partners, with Azimut's Digitech fund, CDP Venture Capital and Primo Ventures investing again, according to Bebeez and Startupbusiness. Blocks and Files wrote in November 2025 that Cubbit had raised about $25 million in total. The EIC award was grant only; Cubbit does not appear among the investors named in either round as the EIC Fund, and the EIC Fund portfolio page could not be retrieved to check.

Italian register filings show what that money bought. Revenue rose from €428,809 in 2022 to €1,367,189 in 2024, while the net loss grew from €2,692,028 to €5,071,582, according to aziende.it; companyreports.it gives the same 2024 figures and personnel costs of €1,984,895. Both list the company as active. The 2023 accounts were not available free of charge. The US data site Latka claims revenue of $6.9 million and no outside funding, which contradicts both the filed accounts and the announced rounds.

Public money has kept flowing too. North Data lists further Horizon 2020 funding of €107,875 for CS3MESH4EOSC, a project linking research storage to the European Open Science Cloud, and several state aid awards in 2025 and 2026 under the EU's Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform (STEP). aziende.it, citing Italy's state aid register, counts 25 aid measures worth €6,822,148 between 2021 and 2026, among them a STEP award of €1,757,797 in January 2026; North Data shows that January 2026 STEP aid as €707,776. The two sources were not reconciled. aziende.it also lists 23 public contracts worth €734,457 since 2023.

Why It Matters for Europe

The EU's data strategy and its push for cloud sovereignty rest on the concern that most European data sits with a few US hyperscalers. Cubbit's current offer is built for that argument: software made in Italy that lets European hosts run S3 storage spread over sites of their choosing, with Ukraine, Poland, the Netherlands and Switzerland added in 2026. Its STEP state aid places it within the EU's critical digital technologies policy. The original environmental case, using idle household hardware instead of new data centres, has faded from the pitch; the website now claims "up to 50% less IT resources" than traditional S3 solutions, a figure the company has not had independently tested in any source found.

The Verdict

Cubbit has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records and published statements, linked throughout.