Acurast Raises $5.4 Million for Global Decentralized Cloud Computing Network

Acurast, a company focused on leveraging smartphones to power a global decentralized cloud computing network, has secured $5.4 million in funding. The investment came through a community-led round led by premier cryptocurrency launchpad CoinList. The sale, which concluded on May 22, 2025, saw Acurast’s ACU token priced at nine cents, resulting in a fully diluted valuation of $90 million.

The company plans to utilize the capital to enhance its protocol, which is designed to provide verifiable, confidential, energy-efficient, and decentralized compute powered by smartphones. Alessandro De Carli, president of the board and co-founder of Acurast, highlighted that the funding will support the company's efforts to enable users to participate in confidential compute tasks, decentralized AI, and blockchain infrastructure, while earning rewards by leveraging the processing power of smartphones.

Acurast has already onboarded over 72,000 smartphones worldwide onto its decentralized testnet, making it the most decentralized and verifiable compute network available today. The company uses Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) of mobile phones to ensure secure and scalable compute, while maintaining confidentiality without requiring trust in the device owner. The ACU token is at the core of Acurast's economy, allowing anyone to run compute with their mobile phones and become stakeholders in the network. Acurast has seen over 300 websites and games created on its platform in the last 24 hours, demonstrating its potential for decentralized and verifiable execution across billions of smartphones. 

Acurast's high-performance Proof of Stake blockchain orchestrates global demand and supply for secure decentralized compute, without the need for centralized data centers. The company's Android and iOS apps offer end-to-end checks of each phone's secure elements, delivering trustless compute at scale. Acurast aims to provide a next-generation decentralized confidential compute platform, purpose-built for web3 and AI demands. The ACU tokens have a total supply of 1,000,000,000 tokens at genesis, with the token utility revolving around network fees, settlement layers, staking, and governance.

Source: Venture Beat