NZ tech startup raises NZD 4.10m

21 June 2019

Termius co-founders Dmitry Lyfar (left) and Roman Kudiyarov.

Auckland-based startup Termius has just closed a $4.10m ($2.7m US) seed round with money from some of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists.

The raise comes off the back of Termius graduating from the world’s most prestigious startup accelerator, Y Combinator, and some high-profile praise from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Termius is used by more than 11,000 network engineers and DevOps — from companies such as SpaceX, Disney, and Cisco — to help them work collaboratively and with more mobility as they manage their IT infrastructure.

It helps speed up many of the repetitive tasks engineers do as they reach, audit and maintain their servers or routers, and allows them to do these tasks on their mobile phones rather than on their desktops.

“Termius served my purpose well and was easy to understand. I like to show off my router and tonight, with family in a restaurant, I even used Termius,” one of the godfather’s of personal computing, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, said when he reviewed the software.

The seed round money will be used to scale Termius from currently being a single-user focused product, to a more team-focussed collaboration tool.

“We believe Termius will totally transform the way network engineers around the world work: whether it’s to help them fix network issues on their phones while they’re on holiday, or collaborate with their teams in ways previously impossible,” Termius CEO and co-founder Roman Kudiyarov says.

“The seed round, and the calibre of investors which comes with it, is a tremendous show of faith in our vision and we’re very excited.”

Tens of millions of engineers who look after infrastructure and networks use a system called SSH for troubleshooting and maintenance.

Most of them have to access SSH through old school clients that have not been designed to work on multiple devices or allow for collaboration with other team members. Termius transforms all that by syncing data across unlimited devices using end-to-end encryption.

“Since founding Termius, we’ve had a fantastic journey of growth but this money allows us to take it to the next level,” COO and co-founder Dmitry Lyfar says.

“The thing that gets us most excited is the thought of helping network engineers in whatever it is they’re working on: whether that’s getting humans to Mars, or making amazing films for children.”

“With Termius, we give engineers more mobility and free time by automating much of the menial work they do. That means they get more time to be creative and innovative, which leads to more of society’s problems being solved through better technology,” Kudiyarov adds.

Kudiyarov and Lyfar founded Termius in October last year in Auckland, after running businesses together in the Serbian and New Zealand IT sector for more than a decade.

They began by building software for other businesses until they decided to commercialise Termius, which they’d developed as a product for their own internal use.

Kudiyarov and Lyfar lead a team of 25 and plan to grow a core team in New Zealand with engineering talent working remotely around the world.

ENDS

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