Data migration business intent on expansion after funding boost
Summary
A Christchurch tech start-up is eyeing up growth in the Asia-Pacific and the United States after securing funding.Couchdrop, which is a data migration company founded in 2019, has closed an investment round with the New Zealand venture capital fund Punakaiki, but wouldnt 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 were looking at building out that outbound capacity. "We keep getting told it and were 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.