Couchdrop Secures Investment From Punakaiki Fund For Global Growth

24 March 2022 - Christchurch data migration start-up company Couchdrop, which moves vast amounts of data for global clients, has closed an investment round with New Zealand’s premiere venture capital fund, Punakaiki Fund.

Couchdrop founder Michael Lawson 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.

“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,” he says.

The company offers two products - Couchdrop SFTP and Movebot.

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.

“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. 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,” Michael says.

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 Michael.

Movebot currently shifts up to 1 Petabyte per month, while Couchdrop is supporting up to 200 million secure file transfers a month.

Lance Wiggs from Punakaiki Fund says the team is delighted to welcome Michael back as the first, second-time 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.

“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 Lance.

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