Bitcasa, a former TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist, is growing quickly in Japan and other Asian countries. To fuel this kind of unexpected international growth, the company has raised $11 million as a follow-on to its previously announced $7 million Series A round. The round was led by Horizons Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners.
The fast international growth is something that took the company’s recently appointed CEO Brian Taptich by surprise. Taptich, who was only announced as Bitcasa’s CEO in September, told me that he believes Bitcasa’s unlimited cloud storage solution appeals to countries that are ahead of the curve with regard to their Internet and mobile infrastructure. Bitcasa, he told me last week, is optimized for a universe where a lot of content is created and stored across multiple devices and where users are always online.
Bitcasa, he also thinks, profits from being considered a very private service, thanks to its client-side and block-level encryption. In light of the recent NSA scandal, that may give it an advantage over other services. Taptich wouldn’t say how many users the company currently has, but noted that it is seeing “continued growth of its user base” and that it’s looking into expanding its platform by adding an API for developers, as well.
Besides the international expansion, the company also plans to use this additional funding to accelerate its product development cycle. As Taptich told me, he considers Bitcasa a platform that allows its users to “do with it whatever they want to.” The company will continue to focus on offering users a lot of storage, but he also noted that there is one gap in its portfolio that he wants to close. Currently, the service doesn’t offer any advanced features for sharing and collaborating on documents, and it looks like the company will focus on adding this to the platform soon. In addition, Bitcasa will build out the portfolio of devices it supports.