Most Recent Slovenian Start-Up: Koofr

Koofr d.o.o. is a start-up founded in September 2012 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, currently with 7 employees.

Its product, also named Koofr, was launched on May 1, 2013. It’s a customizable hybrid cloud storage interface, built to address and solve the problems of public and private cloud storage for employees and applications. It can connect to OpenStack Swift, SwiftStack, Amazon S3, RackSpace cloud files, Linux web and Windows file server, and Mac OSX laptop. It also enables users to access and share all the files via web and mobile interface.

“It exposes its own API, allowing applications, back-end services and backup operations to access and use the same hybrid storage as employees do,” according to the company. “Customers who will benefit the most are ISPs and cloud infrastructure providers who want to offer storage-as-a-service solutions to their end users. Koofr can be fully branded, running on-premise or in the cloud.”

“It uses technologies from Scala, Akka, Python, iOS, Android, OpenStack Swift and Ceph,” according to CTO Gregor Beslic.

“Koofr is just an interface to file-based storage (Windows, Linux and Mac OSX) or object storage systems (OpenStack Swift, Ceph). Our interface does not affect the way files are stored on your storage systems – all the files will still be there, even if you access them without Koofr,” he added.

Competitors include ownCloud, Gladinet, and Storage Made Easy.

All of them being students at Univerza v Ljubljani,
three main young executives are:

•  Damjan Maticic, CEO, is also currently at XLAB, and Mladina d.d. and was previously at cyberGRID GmbH, Studentski klub Kamnik, and Zabec.net
• Gregor Beslic, CTO, was formerly at the University of Ljubljana, in faculty of computer and information science, and Appoteka
• Jaka Mocnik, VP engineering, is also actually ay XLAB and served at Activetools, and Jozef Stefan Institute.