With Disrupt London right around the corner, we thought it’d be a good idea to check in with participants from past Startup Battlefield competitions to see what they’ve been up to since the show.
Sher.ly is a SaaS-based software that essentially gives teams and telecommuters a private, project-centric cloud with the goal of giving users full control over their data. The company participated in the 2013 Disrupt Europe Startup Battlefield in Berlin, and things have been pretty interesting for the company in the two years that have passed since the show.
Sher.ly CEO Blazej Marciniak tells TechCrunch that, overall, participating in the Startup Battlefield was “an amazing experience [and] very exciting,” aside from “one tiny problem with [the] clicker which haunts me to this day.”
Despite these technical issues, the show helped the company add 600 users to the company’s beta program within two days after the show ended. And, in the two years since the show, the company has secured $500,000 in funding from three investors.
The service itself has improved quite a bit over that time period, according to Blazej. In June 2014, the company ran a successful Kickstarter for the Sherlybox, a slick-looking desktop network storage system that puts a personal cloud on your desktop complete with removable hard drive and a touch sensor for configuration. It raised over $150,000 from just under 900 backers.
About 600 of those backers actually bought the Sherlybox on Kickstarter, and the company has sold a total of 1,000 units to date and has around 6,000 business customers. Over the next few years, the company plans to become available on every major storage platform as a hardware agnostic platform for secure data collaboration, something they think will help them take that growth to the next level.
Disrupt London 2015 takes place December 7 – 8 at London’s beautiful Copper Box Arena. We still have some tickets available on our ticketing page; early-bird prices are extended until Wednesday.
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