Hearing about employees giving up their highly-prized, stable, and well-paid corporate careers in Korea's tech behemoths used to be incredibly rare. But the young team at ASDTech has done exactly that, choosing to give up salaries of well over $100k for the excitement and promise of entrepreneurship.

Having founded ASDTech in 2013 after leaving LG Electronics, they developed their while-label cloud service, 'Cloudike', and have now secured their first major clients. Furthermore they have just secured $1M from three Korean VCs to extend their capabilities, particularly in global sales. Leading the round was Bon Angels, with Coolidge Corner and The Ventures participating.

What is Cloudike?

Unlike Dropbox, which targets individual users, Cloudike is a white-label service which is licensed to mobile service providers (MSPs). Co-Founder Maxim Azarov, originally a product manager at Google explained that "For a fraction of the development cost that is typically incurred while developing a comparable service from the scratch, Cloudike offers a platform with the full range of end-user applications. These are ready to be customized to the MSP's requirements. This is aimed at saving cost and greatly improves time-to-market."

"Cloudike is a fully scalable solution, ready for bare-metal and cloud based installations. It could be easily deployed from scratch or organically scaled up for multi million users. Cloudike Rapid Sync engine can handle multiple accesses from different users and devices to the shared resource with help of real-time notification and a messaging service," SunUng stated.

The benefits of Cloudike and other services like it are compelling. Whereas the average Dropbox music file takes around 58 seconds to upload in Korea, KT's cloud service, which benefits from local servers, allows for upload speeds of a similar file in only three seconds.

Cloudike’s first client was Megafon, the No. 2 mobile operator in Russia. For the team, that was a major turning point. Gaining buy-in from a major domestic MSP provided validation of their efforts in the open market. It also began to prove that their choice to exchange security at LG for a less certain future as entrepreneurs was perhaps their best ever career decision.

Following from their first success a number of other major clients have been signed up. Vestel, an OEM in Turkey which lacks specialism in internet, cloud, and other software solutions is bundling Cloudike with their devices like smartphones and tablets. Huawei, a Chinese OEM that builds storage solutions is also a key client helping Cloudike build their reputation and global reach, especially in South America, the UAE and other developing markets. Recently the team has also been looking at SE Asian and Indian markets. Not on the list of target markets are the US and Western Europe, which SunUng said they are happy to leave to Dropbox for now.

Clouike will focus on emerging markets, leaving Dropbox 'to play' in the west

Why Will Cloudike Win, While Dropbox Flounders?

Recently Dropbox has been in the press for its torrid experiences in trying to build revenue prior to its increasingly unlikely IPO. SunUng believes that these problems centre around the difficulty in monetizing a personal cloud service and acquiring users. Cloudike however is going after the mobile service providers (MSPs) themselves who already have customers and need services like Cloudike in order to stay relevant in a rapidly changing digital environment. SunUng strongly believes that third party white label solutions will be one of the key factors in the success of MSPs in the future.

About Cloudike's Recent Investment

Cloudike has today announced that they have raised $950k for a 20% stake in their company. Bon Angels, a renowned Korean early stage investor lead the seed round and will take a board seat, with Coolidge Corner Investment and newly formed, The Ventures, participating.

Cloudike had approached US VCs, but found that term sheet conditions offered by Korean VCs were much better. As SunUng explained, US investors wanted to control the management of the startup, requiring two board seats and up to 50% equity for a similar sized investment. In contrast, the three Korean VCs have allowed Cloudike's executive team to maintain much more control.

The financial boost will be used to strengthen sales, and build additional distribution channels globally. The developer team also plans to extend their personal cloud service to business users.

Leaving LG For A Startup

SunUng and his predominantly Russian engineering team had been tasked with developing cloud services for LG back in 2010, but after their funding was pulled in 2012 the team began to consider alternative options of progressing their vision, believing that what they were developing had massive global potential.

In 2013 the original team broke away from LG Electronics, leaving corporate salaries to strike out on their own. Naturally they were unable to bring the source code from LG, but rapidly developed a new cloud service aimed at filling a large void left by services like DropBox and Box.

"Leaving LG was a very difficult decision," admitted SunUng. "Financially it was definitely a major risk and we have all experienced hardship. However, the founders really wanted to continue the adventure we'd started at LG. Our great enthusiasm for adventure is much more appealing than the stability offered by LG."

One might think that the team may have faced issues from their former employee (they founded company only four months after leaving LG). However, so far communication with LG has been positive. In fact, the conglomerate has even recently invited SunUng to lecture LG staff about new business strategy.

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