French startup Infinit raised $1.8 million in funding from Alven Capital and 360 Capital Partners. The Infinit app differs from WeTransfer or CloudApp as it uses peer-to-peer technology to boost file sharing between two users. And there isn’t any file size restriction.
“We see that a lot of our users share huge files,” co-founder and COO Baptiste Fradin told me in a phone interview. “And a lot of people managed to digitize processes that were still physical. For example, in video post-production, you had to hire a delivery person to ship a hard drive — now you can use Infinit.”
An Australian post-production studio recently sent a 500GB file in just 32 minutes using Infinit — it didn’t cost a dime. In other words, the app works quite well between two Infinit users. But what happens when you are sending a file to someone who probably doesn’t use Infinit?
My colleague Steve O’Hear first covered Infinit back in July 2013. Now, you can generate a link and download the file from your browser. It works a lot like CloudApp or Droplr — you drag and drop a file to your status bar, and paste the link in an email or chat window. The only difference is that this time, the file will be uploaded to Infinit’s servers.
The startup wants to cover every use case when it comes to file sharing. As the platform puts a lot of emphasis on big files, you can seamlessly pause and resume your uploads. If you are on the same local network, Infinit will take advantage of that and switch to much faster local transfers.
The company also just introduced the Windows beta — the app has been available on OS X for a few months now. “We want to be available on even more platforms. We have a robust and seamless service, and we will bring that to every existing platform,” Fradin said.
The company is taking part in Techstars NY‘s current batch and was previously accelerated at Le Camping. Today’s funding round will be used to hire a few people. The company plans to keep the majority of its team in Paris.
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Photo credit: Bogdan Suditu under the CC BY 2.0 license