Michael Lawson (Couchdrop)
A Christchurch-based data migration system developer is realising the power of partnership to grow fast at home and abroad.
Couchdrop develops a platform which allows its global clients to migrate large volumes of data quickly, easily and safely.
“In the last year, our products have supported petabytes [PB] of data movement and billions of file transfers into the cloud, helping companies to accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies," said founder Michael Lawson.
Clients include well known international media, technology, financial and educational enterprises, he said, including Fortune 500 firms.
The company offers two products, Couchdrop SFTP for regular secure file transfers within and between organisations and Movebot, which helps organisations transfer data between cloud platforms.
Both had seen rapid and accelerating adoption, Lawson said.
“In the last few months, we have partnered with cloud provider giants, including Dropbox, Egynte and Backblaze, and are transferring petabytes of data into the cloud," he said.
"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 [Asia Pacific] and North American markets.”
Managed service providers (MSP), which are often tasked with delivering data migrations for clients, are a key target customer base for Movebot and more than 250 had already adopted the tool.
"Movebot is all about the MSP," Lawson told Reseller News. "Migrations tend to happen at the last minute. A decision is made from a financial or preference perspective and the MSP has to execute."
Where most MSP sales are direct customers, Movebot is also being sold through cloud storage partners such as Dropbox.
"Dropbox is selling Movebot," Lawson said. "It is bundling Movebot in its deals. For us it is brilliant - everyone knows Dropbox and they do all the selling."
The COVID-19 pandemic had also accelerated the move to the cloud, prompting businesses to try and consolidate storage platforms such as 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” Lawson said.
That activity and growth is attracting investors as well, in the form of New Zealand venture capital firm Punakaiki Fund, to help accelerate product development and growth.
Punakaiki founder Lance Wiggs had invested successfully in an earlier Lawson company, Linewize, making him the VC fund's first second-time founder. Linewize was sold for $16.5 million in 2017.
“Michael and his co-founders are superb at creating elegantly simple, deeply technical software to solve deceptively difficult problems involving large amounts of data," Wiggs said.
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 had a clear road towards rapid growth, Wiggs said.
"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."
Lawson said both Punakaiki and Couchdrop took a lean approach to business and he had a lot of respect for Wiggs. However, where Linewize was sold relatively early in its story, Couchdrop was a "keeper".
"Now is the time to really grow and scale things up," he said. "We don't do outbound sales and customers are coming through the doors."
Movebot currently shifts up to 1 PB/month, while Couchdrop is supporting up to 200 million secure file transfers a month.
