On Tuesday, Servers.com, a prominent backer of Lensa AI made a significant exit from the company, cashing out a fat sum of money.
Backed by Palta, the Lensa app achieved widespread success by sending AI-generated images from Stable Diffusion into mainstream social media.
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CloudOne Digital announced its acquisition of Servers.com on Tuesday.
While the exact amount remains undisclosed, SurgeZirc NG gathered from reliable sources that the exit was worth an impressive $200 million.
Servers.com is a provider of “bare metal” services with data centers across North America, Western Europe, and Asia.
The company was co-founded by Alexey Gubarev, who is also one of the founders/partners of Palta—the same company that backed Prisma Labs, the startup team that created Lensa AI.
Palta has a reputation for supporting AI-driven startups and health apps, and it boasts several consumer mobile apps, including Flo (a period and ovulation tracker), Simple (a nutrition program), and Zing (an AI-powered personal fitness companion).
Although insiders believe the acquisition to be highly lucrative, both CloudOne Digital and Gubarev have chosen not to disclose the acquisition price publicly, merely confirming the exit.
Gubarev, a permanent resident of Cyprus since 2002, has been actively involved in advocating for the tech ecosystem in Cyprus.
However, as a former Russian citizen, he has faced allegations of association with his previous home country.
In 2020, Gubarev sued BuzzFeed in a U.S. court over implications that a company he owned, XBT, was involved in the “Methbot” scam, supposedly serving Russia’s main domestic security agency, the FSB.
The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, and Gubarev and XBT executives maintained that they were actually “unsung heroes” who had terminated the Methbot account in 2016 and preserved hard drives as evidence for the U.S. justice system.
Following the acquisition, Servers.com will become part of CloudOne Digital’s “Liquid Web” family of brands, a holding company housing various multi-cloud-based solutions.
The co-founders of Servers.com, Nick Dvas and Konstantin Bezruchenko, will assume key roles within CloudOne Digital’s leadership team.
Dvas will become the president of Servers.com, and Bezruchenko will be in charge of global infrastructure and procurement.
Servers.com, with headquarters in Limassol, Cyprus, currently operates 18 global data centers and serves over 3,000 customers worldwide.
The company specializes in “Infrastructure as a Service” for enterprises with substantial, ongoing workloads in industries such as video gaming, fintech, adtech, IT services, sports tech, and web3 applications.
The success of the Lensa AI app can be attributed to its clever use of Stable Diffusion, an open source AI model capable of creating images based on a vast training dataset comprising billions of images gathered from the internet.
By November 2022, the app had reportedly earned over $70 million in revenue.
However, Lensa AI faced controversy when users exploited it to generate explicit images. The company responded by promising to implement safeguards to prevent such misuse in the future.
The acquisition of Servers.com aligns with CloudOne Digital’s strategic plan to bolster its multi-cloud capabilities.
It will particularly target mid-market customers with compute-intensive workloads.
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The addition of Servers.com’s infrastructure expertise enhances CloudOne Digital’s position in the tech industry and opens up new opportunities for growth.
As the acquisition proceeds, the tech community eagerly anticipates further developments, especially with the involvement of prominent figures like Alexey Gubarev.
