Manage data easily with Kloudless, a Berkeley startup

One of oldest email ID’s I had created on Gmail is still the one I use most often. But it literally takes all my energy every once in a while to delete thousands of emails from my mail box as Gmail comes with limited space. Most of the space is consumed by attachments, be it doc files, ppts, pictures, music files and so on. Upgrading to more space on Gmail will be my only option in case I decide not to delete thousands of mails. Of course, there are cloud storage services like Dropbox, which make our life easier but when it comes to email, it still requires action from users’ end to store important files on cloud storage service.

Kloudless is a tech startup based out of Berkeley, California, taking on this challenge by allowing easy access and managing data from many cloud services by integrating your email and cloud storage. It was started in August 2011 by four founders who met at University of California, Berkeley, in 2008. After graduation, they worked for IBM, NASA and Blackberry before reuniting to start Kloudless.

When asked about their inspiration behind the idea, Vinod Chandru, co-founder of Kloudless says, “One of my co-founders was an early Gmail user. Earlier, Google’s marketing message for Gmail was ‘you’ll never have to delete an email ever again’. So he never did.

In the summer of 2011, he started running out of space in his Gmail account, because he shared and collaborated on many files via email. It made more sense to offload the file sharing/collaboration process to Dropbox, which is built specifically to manage files. However, Google didn’t have any way to easily move files between the two services.”

Most users collaborate on documents every day, largely relying on email as the center of their workflow. With so much data sharing over emails, it becomes demanding to make email and cloud storage work together. Moreover everyone has their own cloud workflow and many of these services are not built to work well together. This need becomes aggravated further as we move more towards cloud-based and mobile-based work environments. “We want Kloudless to be the pipes that connects all these different services and applications. It also helps companies gain visibility into cloud data ownership and control the data workflow across SaaS applications,” adds Vinod.

“Earlier this year, Gartner also shared that roughly a third of the world’s digital content will be kept on the cloud by 2016, which corresponds with IDC forecasts of a 130% increase in cloud usage,” explains Vinod. This growth is based on users’ desire to share and access content on multiple devices without the need to manually transfer and synchronize data.

Vinod claims that many of their users are connecting two or more cloud storage accounts to Kloudless. To their surprise, they have noticed large number of employees from India quickly adapting to Kloudless which made them prioritize on Mozilla Firefox extension which has gained good traction.

Kloudless has raised over $1 million in funding till date from prominent angel investors like David Sacks, founder of Yammer and Tim Draper, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

You can find more information about Kloudless here.