Kleii, a Vietnamese Cloud service that was forced to temporarily down shutters late last year because it grew faster than expected, is now back with a new business model & fresh funding. And its developers say they are now more wiser than before!
Kleii co-founder & CEO Nguyen Tuan Son wrote in a blog post that TheFarm, a venture capital company located at Kyrgyzstan, had invested an undisclosed sum in Kleii, allowing them to restructure & relaunch with a new business model.
Before we get to what the Cloud service is offering afresh, let’s backtrack a bit to what it was. Kleii was co-founded in Nov 2011 by Nguyen Tuan Son & Yerlan Tasbulatov, who is the company’s CFO.
Kleii allowed users to upload & sync their personal digital Content to the Cloud. They could access the Content from anywhere, & on any device. Since Kleii synced all your Content across all your devices, users could access to all of it at any time & on any devices, even if they were temporarily disconnected from the Internet.
Kleii quickly gained traction, & 4 months after the public beta, had more than 300,000 users. By March 2013, it had hit the million-user mark. The problem was that they were giving away the house for free, with users burning up to 50 gigs under the freemium model.
Even after a seed funding round in April 2013 led by several angel investors, there was no way to keep it going because it was simply not sustainable. To cut a long story short, the company ceased operations & went on a short hiatus.
But the guys are back now, & hopefully have a more realistic business model. As part of a “welcome back” package deal, Kleii’s previously paying customers will now get a year’s Cloud service free (that free word, again), inclusive of 100GB storage. Everyone else can get discounts while signing up.
Kleii also announced a partnership with Viettel, the biggest mobile operator in Vietnam. Under it, Viettel will debut a new Cloud platform for storage & syncing based on Kleii’s technology.
This is the kind of partnership that could have saved Kleii when they struggling to stay afloat last year. However, they seem to be doing things the right way now, & their Cloud service still has its user base in Vietnam & Southeast Asia, so it’s likely that things will work out nicely for Kleii this time.
Image Credit: Kleii
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