Dropsuite  - formerly  Dropmysite - is born out of a reverse takeover by loss-making ASX-listed resources company Excalibur Mining.

The capital raising of up to $8 million from 80 million shares at $0.10 each, led by Novus Capital is expected to be over-subscribed.

Dropsuite CEO Charif El-Ansari  - a former head of Google in Asia - has been in Australia on a roadshow and says the company – a back-up and recovery provider – is continuing its push to build business in the Australian market through its alliances with local resellers and distributors.  

El-Ansari told iTWire funds from the capital raising – expected to be oversubscribed - will be used to create a “worldclass business development and market organisation around resellers and partnerships”, and to invest in technololgy and the creation of software solutions to satisfy the demands of global partner companies – like Go Daddy, Ingram Micro, Singtel and Japan’s GMO Internet - for “very very good” software.

Dropsuite has an alliance with one of its oldest partners in the Australian market, Sydney-based OzHosting.

Crowd Mobile non executive chairman and Melbourne IT and News Corp executive Theo Hnarakis, will be Dropsuite’s non-executive chairman.

El-Ansari says Dropsuite is already laying the building blocks for its expansion in the Australian market, currently interviewing for a general manager who will be based here but have responsibility across its entire Asia Pacific operation.

“Although Australia is not a huge market it will be a very interesting market as part of our expansion strategy,” El-Ansari says.

“We are attacking the small business space, which is by far the most underserved market, including for backup technology, and the fastest market for adoption of cloud and SAAS offerings.

“That’s why our services are resonating with SMBs because they are in the cloud and good for price-sensitive, non-technology savvy SMBs, offering them affordable solutions.”

“At Google first adopters were SMBs. If you look at the revenue growth of the business, the start point was with SMBs not big business.”

El-Ansari says Dropsuite reached100,000 paid users worldwide of its backup and recovery solutions in August this year with 500% growth in revenue.

On SMBs and protection of their businesses, El-Ansari says there are 30,000 websites hacked daily, and 62% of SMBs do not routinely back up their data.

“Over the past 12 months there have been some well documented international incidents of website hacking which raise huge personal security issues with groups like Ashley Madison, Target (40 million credit and debit card details stolen) and Yahoo (500 million accounts hacked).”

“Businesses in Australia should be aware of these international statistics on website hacking,” El-Ansari warns.