After operating from the Kiwi Landing Pad in San Francisco for the past 18 months, Mako Networks continues to accelerate its international growth with the opening of a new office in the city.
The cloud-based network management and security specialist firm has grown from humble beginnings 13 years ago in a Herne Bay flat, to a global company with offices in Auckland, London, Melbourne, and now San Francisco.
“The Kiwi Landing Pad has served as a great base to help us get established here in North America, and through an international team effort, we have been able to grow quickly and secure major U.S. clients,” says Simon Gamble, Mako Networks’ Co-Founder and President for North America.
“We’re excited to have entered the next stage of our growth, ‘graduating’ into a new facility that will serve as the base for our North American operations.
“We have significant plans for the U.S. market and this new office is a pleasing milestone for us,” says Gamble.
As a beneficiary of a $4.2 million Technology Development Grant in 2011 from the then Ministry of Science and Innovation, Mako has used its grant to springboard an aggressive growth strategy that has enabled rapid expansion for the company in the United States two years later.
Mako says its story shows that the government’s R&D grant funding programme through Callaghan Innovation is supporting the growth of Kiwi companies, particularly those competing in niche markets offshore.
“The return on investment for the grant funding we’ve received is evident in the way our organisation has matured over the past 24 months,” says Bill Farmer, Mako Networks CEO. “We’ve added skilled staff, accelerated the development of new technologies, and ignited the fires that will fuel our success in the United States. Were it not for these grants, Mako’s journey would have been very different.”
Since receiving the Technology Development Grant, Mako has used the funds to support several strategic initiatives, including:
• Adding 15 key staff at its R&D centre in Albany, employing New Zealanders in highly skilled technical positions.
• Undertaking a number of new development projects that have assisted in winning significant new business. The development team has been able to add specific functionality requested by a prospective customer, which helped Mako win its largest contract in the United States.
• Increasing the capacity of its server and system management, preparing the business to scale effectively and support the significant number of new customers the company intends to onboard during the next three years.
• Enabling the fast-track development of new projects that will help it to maintain a technological advantage over competitors.
• Researching architecture revisions needed to support the new IPv6 addressing standard, which will fundamentally change the way the Internet addresses are assigned.
Mako’s headquarters and R&D facility is based in Auckland and employs more than 80 New Zealand residents. The company expects to double its headcount in the coming year across a variety of areas including development, customer support and operational roles.
