The concept of “cloud printing” has promised a lot but not exactly set the world on fire. Google Cloud Print (GCP) is designed for printing from mobile devices. However, it’s not an offering for larger organisations and doesn’t offer any features around the management of printers, a typical office headache. And Papercut is largely higher education focused and doesn’t have a mobile offering.
ezeep thinks it can end the printing headache for small and large companies.
To realise its vision it’s now closed what it describes as a “sizeable 7-digit round” (terms undisclosed, but we understand it’s around $4M) from new investors IBB and existing shareholders, which include Mangrove Capital Partners and HTGF.
The company claims to have direct sales in over 12 countries with small to publicly listed companies.
CEO Sascha Kellert says the company has also signed a distribution partnership with ALSO, Europe’s third largest IT distributor, which serves 12 countries and will resell ezeep to over 10,000 resellers.
Ezeep’s platform can ‘see’ printers across an office network, enabling users to print documents from the cloud, rather than hard drives. The idea is to do to the world of printing what salesforce did to the CRM category, or what Dropbox did for filesharing. And they’ve been winning people over from GCP.
Customers connect their print infrastructure to the service with their server applications and can then centrally manage printers and printing to save time and money (no more print drivers, less time spent on administering printing internally). Staff can print from any device inside the organization without any drivers. Administrators can define printing rules to drive down volume and per page costs.
The company currently has 15 staff in Berlin and is planning to open a U.S. office in 2014.