Wuala 'merges' with LaCie to take P2P cloud storage mainstream

Wuala, the Zurich-based peer-to-peer-storage startup owned by Caleido AG, has been taken over by LaCie, the French manufacturer of external storage devices in a deal which frankly makes a lot of sense. One has an application, the other has storage hardware.

They are calling it a merger, but Wuala is clearly a lot smaller than LaCie. The deal marks a high point for Wuala co-founder and CEO Dominik Grolimund, but rather confirms the usual course of European startups in exiting as early as they can rather than scaling their startups to a point that they become world-beaters. It also looks like they either didn’t go for the VC deals they were rumoured to be in discussion about, or that those talks never came to fruition.

However, all props to Grolimund who has been on a four year journey from developing what became Wuala ago at the ETH Zurich to something that could end up being a reliable and secure cloud storage backed by millions of devices. Philippe Spruch, founder and CEO of LaCie thinks the Wuala deal will lead LaCie to transform from a hardware manufacturer to a “digital storage provider”. He may have something there.

We’ve previously written about Wuala at length here.