San Antonio—Filestack, a startup offering software that aims to make uploading photos and other content to applications easier and more reliable, has hired a new CEO: Sameer Kamat, an executive and engineer who spent the last 15 years at data and application backup company Unitrends.
Kamat started at Unitrends as a software engineer and worked his way up to become the vice president of product management, starting in 2015. He left that role two months ago to move to San Antonio for the Filestack CEO position. Kamat says he was based in Columbia, SC, where Unitrends had its head office until moving headquarters to Burlington, MA, in 2014.
Kamat succeeds former Filestack CEO Pat Matthews, who left the company earlier this year. Matthews, a former Rackspace employee, now runs an investment firm, Active Capital, with two other ex-Rackers. Active filed a statement with the SEC last week showing it has received about $13.1 million in commitments so far.
Filestack has been refining its application programming interface (API), which works through a widget that software developers can integrate with their apps in order to let users upload files from cloud-based programs (Google Drive, Facebook, or Dropbox, for example) rather than just their hard drive. The company was working on adding more complex offerings to the API in recent months, such as the ability to automatically crop photos or apply filters, before Matthews left and will continue to do so under Kamat, he says.
Filestack is also adding a service that attempts to ensure larger files will upload to its customers’ apps even if a user has a spotty Internet connection, Kamat says in a telephone interview. Filestack’s API now has algorithms that monitor 10 to 15 conditions to determine how to maximize the upload speed of something like a photo to a social media app, despite an unreliable connection, Kamat says. (He declined to provide more detail, saying the technology is proprietary).
“We’ve got to build on our platform that is already stellar, and tell our story,” Kamat says. “When you talk about the problem at large [of mobile data growthand content management], this makes a big dent in that.”
The company has helped users upload almost 1 billion files, Kamat says. More than 75,000 developers at companies such as Coca-Cola, SendGrid, and JibJab incorporate Filestack in more than 100,000 applications, according to a news release.
Filestack was founded in 2012 by MIT students. Its ownership has changed hands a few times since, most recently when it was acquired by San Antonio-based investment firm Scaleworks in December.
