Australian document management startup Nitro is seeing big growth in enterprise customers, signing up big names including Toyota – with the channel proving instrumental in its transition from SME focused startup to enterprise player.

Nitro, which provides document productivity solutions which compete with Adobe Acrobat, privoted to focus on large enterprise CIOs – and transitioning them away from Adobe – 18 months ago, after initially focusing on small and medium sized businesses.

The company, which started in Melbourne in 2005, says it has 600,000 customers and has just secured US$15 million venture capital funding to help further its global enterprise push.

Sam Chandler, Nitro founder and chief executive, says the new funding puts the vendor in a strong position to fulfil its ‘aggressive' growth plans for the enterprise while continuing to scale its operations globally and increase its R-D efforts.

“Around the world, enterprises are realising that Nitro makes businesses more secure through seamless, standardised digital workflows, more sustainable by eliminating paper-based processes and, ultimately, more productive by empowering everyone in an organisation to edit, share, sign, approve, track and collaborate on documents, saving big in terms of time and costs,” Chandler says.

Nitro, whose reseller base includes Insight, Software One, Dimension Data and Data#3, says its enterprise sales increased at an average of nearly 40% in 2015 and 2016, and it added more than 300 new enterprise customers in 2016.

It now counts large enterprises including Australian Government, Bluescope Steel, NSW Police, Toyota, Treasury Wine Estates and Murray Goulburn and CBRE among its customers, and says that's thanks to the help of its resellers.

Michael Brown, Nitro board member and general partner at Battery Ventures which lead the latest funding round, says Nitro has a ‘big opportunity' to disrupt the document productivity market.