SMX Raises $1.67 Million

SMX Raises $1.67 Million To Fund Further International Growth

New Zealand anti-spam and anti-virus company SMX has completed a second fundraising round, raising $1.67 million from leading investors including Sam Morgan’s investment company Jasmine Investment Holdings, Stephen Tindall’s K1W1 investment vehicle and Endeavour Capital (a New Zealand Venture Investment Company).

SMX chairman John Quirk said the new capital would fund SMX’s accelerated international market growth, building on solid progress over the last 12 months in India and Indonesia and also developing new opportunities in Japan and Australia.

SMX managing director Jesse Ball said that despite the global recession, Internet usage continued to grow strongly – as had the volume of spam and the sophistication of virus attacks. He said that the SMX service – which scrubs mail before it reaches customer networks – had strong differentiators over the best competing services available worldwide.

“We’re obviously delighted that savvy technology investors such as Stephen Tindall and Sam Morgan are prepared to back our international growth strategy,” Jesse Ball said. “We are also pleased that our first round investor Endeavour Capital has continued to express confidence in our progress and plans.”

About SMX

Launched in February 2006, SMX is a privately-owned secure email software development and services company. Based in Auckland, SMX co-founders Jesse Ball and Thom Hooker lead a sales and development team focused on local and international sales through reseller and licence agreements.

The SMX business model is for customers to be charged a monthly fee, based on the number of users within each customer business. Spam and viruses are cleaned before they reach customer networks with savings in network bandwidth frequently being more than the monthly cost of the service.
Technology innovations include the unique ability to service multiple customers out of a single system (multi-tenanted). No other service-based solution is so easily scalable, and no other is so fast to deploy – taking literally two or three phone calls and less than half a day to fully deploy across the largest organisation.

The SMX service is also designed to be easily ‘white labelled’, which means customers such as Telcos, IT services companies and Internet Service Providers can incorporate the service under their own brands.

Another key point of competitive difference is in SMX’s ability to locally deploy infrastructure. Local deployment ensures email is not routed through countries such as the United States, but is scrubbed in the customers own country under local law and jurisdiction.

SMX has a blue chip list of local customers including the Automobile Association, the Accident Compensation Corporation, Harcourts, CPIT (Christchurch Polytechnic), Karen Walker and a number of local government and council organisations.

In 2008, SMX signed an important reseller agreement with India’s largest IT services company, CMC - a subsidiary of the giant Tata Group. CMC now has two data-centres up and running to host the SMX service.

ENDS

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