SurDoc launches document sharing with $4M in funding

IDG Ventures invests in a new way to share documents across all platforms

We have all experienced the frustration of receiving an attachment we can't open -- usually when there is a pressing deadline to tackle.

SurDoc, a document formatting system that launched Wednesday, is trying to take out the frustration of finding a universal document platform by allowing anyone to upload their documents to share with anyone they choose, without losing the formatting they have created on their computer.

The Menlo Park-based company is in trial beta and is allowing people to join its system for free for up to 10 GB of information. 

The company also raised a $4 million round of funding from IDG Ventures in order to launch its free beta service. Users don't need a PDF reader or any software on their computer or mobile device to use SurDoc.

SurDoc told VatorNews that cloud computing is growing exponentially and could reach $22.6 billion worldwide by 2015.

While there are several popular services in the document-sharing space, such as Dropbox, box.net, Norton (from Symantec) and SugarSync, SurDoc's CEO Alex Wang tells VatorNews that SurDoc is trying to do something different.

"SurDoc goes beyond what the others don't," Wang told Vator. "We provide cloud storage-plus. We have a document technology service where you can manipulate documents in the cloud. It's value-added for the customer and that is why we can offer it as a freemium. We currently offer 10GB storage to the customer for free. Dropbox only offers 2GB free." 

Wang has more than 20 years experience in the document processing spaceand is currently the chairman of the UOML Technical Committee of OASIS, an acclaimed international standards committee -- which has Google and Microsoft as some of its members.

While the service is great for everyone, SurDoc is focusing on targeting the mobile worker and others that are out of the office for a majority of their time. This service makes it easy to do work without having to be at your desktop because the service works with any mobile device -- and you access the service through any HTML 5-enabled browser such as IE, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

SurDoc lets users edit and annotate documents -- but further features will be added in coming months. 

Future plans for SurDoc include adding the ability to work with all of the Google Docs elements. Current document formats that can be imported include: .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .SVG ppt, .pptx, ODF, PDF, XPS, and HTML.

The 10 GB of free storage offered now will also include free, secure and completely automatic backup of Microsoft Windows data files to the cloud. 

A similar company, Dropbox recieved a sizable Series B round of financing, $250 million, in October. Dropbox, which is estimated to be worth $4 billion, has more than 45 million users and saves 1 billion files every three days. Box.net also saw some serious investments this year. In August, Box.net added another $18.6 million of a $35 million round -- bringing the year total of funding to $83 million.  With over six million users and 300 million documents on file, Box serves over 60,000 businesses, from SMBs to large enterprises.

SurDoc uses the UOML (Unstructured Operation Markup Language) technology which differentiates it from a PDF so that you can easily change the document and the formatting if you wish. 

"SurDoc is a milestone in document portability - email attachments on cell phones just don't work as seamlessly as they could," said Laurent Liscia, executive director of OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) said in a statement. "SurDoc lets you access your documents from a browser - nothing could be simpler."