Another week, another investment.
We’re very pleased to announce we’ve taken a 17.9% stake in Christchurch data migration start-up company Couchdrop, which moves vast amounts of data for global clients.
We like the company, not the least because of the founder, Michael Lawson, who will be Punakaiki Fund’s first, second-time founder. We’ve previously invested in Michael’s first company Linewize, an internet safety company keeping Kiwi kids safe online, providing a cloud-managed firewall service specifically developed for the education sector. Australian cyber safety vendor Family Zone acquired Linewize, as part of its continuing expansion in the education sector, in a deal worth $16.5 million in October 2017.
Lance says he’s a proven bet. “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.
“With a global market of enterprises of all sizes, and supported by strong and growing partnerships with cloud service providers and ICT partners, Couchdrop and Movebot have a clear road of rapid growth ahead. Movebot’s major competitors have been acquired by specific cloud partners, and it is now even more clearly the best independent way to transfer data between cloud platforms,” says Wiggs.
Michael says the investment will accelerate product development and growth. “We like to think of ourselves as a small New Zealand company, doing huge things on an international stage.”
What does Couchdrop do?
“In the last year, our products have supported petabytes of data movement and billions of file transfers into the cloud, helping companies to accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies. Our clients include very well known international media, technology, financial and educational enterprises,” says Michael.
“We have partnered with cloud provider giants, including Dropbox, Egynte and Backblaze, and are transferring petabytes of data into the Cloud. We are also working with a number of top managed service provider partners across the globe, and are especially excited about our opportunities in the APAC and North American markets.”
The company offers two products – Couchdrop SFTP and Movebot. Movebot currently shifts up to 1 Petabyte per month, while Couchdrop is supporting up to 200 million secure file transfers a month.
Movebot helps companies transfer vast amounts of files between cloud platforms, while Couchdrop SFTP is for regular secure file transfers within and between organisations. Both products have seen rapid acceleration in adoption over the last 12 months, and Lawson says they are cementing their place in the data moving and cloud adoption industry.
Covid has accelerated the move to the cloud across the board and businesses are trying to consolidate to storage platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive and infrastructure platforms like Amazon AWS and Azure. “We discovered that this move was far from trivial and the toolset to enable a fast and easy transition was missing,” says Lawson.
See Michael interviewed today on NBR
About Couchdrop (the Company)
Founded in 2019, Couchdrop specialises in moving large amounts of data between cloud platforms, and doing so at high speed, securely and at a cost-effective price. The small highly technical team is led by Micheal Lawson, and includes a number of former staff and shareholders from Linewize.
About MoveBot
Movebot helps enterprises migrate their data to the cloud, and between cloud platforms. For example clients might migrate all of their enterprise data from Google Drive to Dropbox, Egnyte to Google, GCP to Wasabi and more – in fact Movebot can migrate to and from over 30 cloud platforms, as well as to and from on-premise servers. While this sounds simple, cloud platforms store and handle files in very different ways, and Movebot helps ensure that transfer and staff transition is seamless.
About Couchdrop (the product)
Couchdrop brings the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) into the cloud era. Millions of businesses use SFTP to transfer business-critical files internally, to peers, financial institutions and regulators. Couchdrop brings this simple internet protocol to work seamlessly with over 30 major cloud platforms, as well as on-premise. This allows businesses and their ICT service providers to easily migrate their own technology platforms to the cloud, while retaining the ability to securely transfer files to and from a vast array of counterparties.
