Dropbox has long been the biggest player in the cloud storage game, but this may soon change. Local startup, Kleii, has just secured its first round of seed funding and has its eyes on the international stage.
Techinasia Editor, Anh Minh-Do has been following the progress of the company since they launched in 2011. Do spoke with Kleii CEO, Nguyen Tuan Son, about his project and here are some of the highlights:
"• After 10 months, Kleii’s got 750,000 users. It’s set to get one million users by the end of this year. That’s explosive growth for a startup coming from Vietnam. • Zero dollars on marketing.
• Kleii transfers five terabytes of data per day.
• Currently Kleii users use it mostly for photo syncing (41 percent), music streaming (27 percent), and video and documents storage (21 percent).
• Kleii’s top users, in descending order, are from: Vietnam, Indonesia, United States, Thailand, Brazil, South Korea, Malaysia, Germany, Australia, Singapore. Indeed, 60 percent of users are in Vietnam."
After playing around with Kleii for a few minutes, it appears to be similar enough to Dropbox from a technical standpoint. Where it sets itself apart is its pricing model that rewards users with extra free space by “unlocking” new tiers of storage.
Nearly all the rewards are based on sharing actions – 3GB for sharing/liking the service on Facebook and 500mb for each friend who joins. The freebies are capped at 50GB, but that should be more than enough for the average user. If you are a data whore, fear not; you can upgrade to a paid plan that maxes out at VND 290,000/month for 200GB.
The first round of seed funding will go towards increasing brand awareness in SE Asia. With a focus on multimedia streaming and mobile devices (the company plans to release apps for Android an iOS within the next month), Kleii is trying its best to distinguish itself from the competition.
The question remains - is it different enough? And if so, can it weather the storm when the Dropboxes of the world start to adapt to a changing market?
