Tech start-up snares $4.1 mln in Silicon Valley capital

By Pattrick Smellie

June 21 (BusinessDesk) - An Auckland-based tech start-up owned by two Russian emigre ICT engineers has raised $4.1 million in seed funding to pursue rapid revenue growth for Termius, an encrypted product that allows users to synchronise data across multiple devices.

Registered at the New Zealand Companies Office in May last year, the company's software-building grunt remains based in Russia, where it employs some 25 staff. Strategy, sales and marketing occur in Auckland, where co-founders and fellow graduates from institutions in the southern Siberian city of Omsk, Roman Kudiyarov and Dmitry Lyfar, are in the process of relocating four Russian staff.

However, the market for Termius is emerging among a range of US heavyweight corporates, according to the Termius website, which claims 24,000 software engineers are using the product daily at organisations including NASA, Cisco, Hewlett Packard, Google rival DuckDuckGo, Comcast, Disney, SpaceX and Lockheed Martin. The site also includes a personal endorsement from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

The seed round funding attracted US$2.7 million from "some of Silicon Valley’s top venture capitalists", the Termius media statement says.

"Our product vision is to build the command line experience around an engineer, not around the mainframe where it all started," Kudiyarov and Lyfar say in a recent post to Hacker News explaining how the product is intended to assist IT infrastructure maintenance and development. "Termius will help engineers to safely keep information about their servers, shell commands, and terminal logs. This information will be available from any device and used to improve productivity."

The seed round money will be used to scale Termius from currently being a single-user focused product, to a more team-focused collaboration tool, said Kudiyarov, who told BusinessDesk the next stage of the company's growth is to pursue 30 to 40 percent monthly growth.

“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,” he said.

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.

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