A Christchurch tech start-up is eyeing up growth in the Asia-Pacific and the United States after securing funding.
Couchdrop founder Michael Lawson is looking to hire staff for a US-based team. Photo: Supplied
Couchdrop, which is a data migration company founded in 2019, has closed an investment round with the New Zealand venture capital fund Punakaiki, but wouldn't say how much it has secured.
The company offered two products, Couchdrop SFTP, for secure file transfers and Movebot, for large file transfers.
Couchdrop said clients include major British media firms and prominent US universities and it has partnered with the cloud storage provider, Dropbox.
Founder Michael Lawson said the company, which has been profitable "from virtually day one", has traditionally waited for customers to come to it, but wants that to change.
"We have some pretty significant ambitions and we're looking at building out that outbound capacity. That will most likely be through hires in the US, not only will we be building out our support team there but we'll be looking at building out a sales team," he said.
"There are a lot of companies out there that have a real need for this and there are a lot of technical partners out there that are looking for a tool and we know this.
"We keep getting told it and we're going to build up the capacity to go hunt them," Lawson said.
He estimated about 80 percent of customers would still be inbound through partners such as Dropbox.
Lance Wiggs from Punakaiki Fund said it was delighted to welcome Lawson back as the first, second-time company founder for the fund.
"Michael and his co-founders are superb at creating elegantly simple, deeply technical software to solve deceptively difficult problems involving large amounts of data.
"As with their previous company, Linewize, this means that their clients are able to perform their tasks with a simple interface and hidden power," he said.
Following the agreement, Punakaiki now holds a 17.9 percent of the share in Couchdrop.
Lawson said the company is targeting revenue of $10 million to $15m over the next couple of years.