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Document productivity company Nitro… will beef up its San Francisco headquarters after raising $15M from Bay Area venture capitalists (VCs) in a bid to go after the big fish of document management, including Adobe and Citrix.

"It's been quite a long process. We wanted to raise money from the right firm. We spent a significant amount of time this year talking to VCs and trying to decide who we wanted to work with - these decisions are very important to us, more so than the money decision."

How can we turn Australia from a country that once rode on the sheep's back, and now rides a mining boom, into an innovation nation? Fresh from raising serious cash, Sam Chandler has some ideas.

Nitro is tracking toward a turnover of $30 million this year and over 50 per cent of the Fortune 500 are using its software. Mr. Chandler said the funding from Battery Ventures would help the ¬company grow and innovate. "For the first time we can paint a very big exciting picture on a blank canvas, and that’s pretty cool," he said.

Chandler disagreed with the line of thinking that employee share options are only needed as a hiring incentive for very young startups that have a higher risk of folding. "It does not reflect an understanding of how equity compensation works in international talent markets," he said. "Companies will choose to hire people where the tax treatment is fair and equitable and it makes commercial sense, and people will choose to go to those same places."

"Battery Ventures has about a billion dollars under management so they’ve got plenty of depth when it comes to the investments they can make per company. Battery and Michael [Brown] have a lot of experience scaling companies from tens of million in revenue, which is where we are today, to hundreds of million in revenue."

Its latest funding round attracted US$15 million from Battery Ventures, which previously invested in companies such as Akamai, Blue Jeans, Freescale, Groupon, Nutanix, Skullcandy and Splunk, as well as less well-known names. Some Battery-backed companies have been acquired by top-tier enterprises such as Apple, Boeing, Cisco, IBM, Salesforce.com and Symantec.

"We've taken our time to think about doing this, and figure out how we wanted to it, and we've built up relationships with VCs over many years. And when we finally said 'you know what, this might be a really great idea and a great turbo-charger for the business', we were in a position to leverage those relationships."

Chandler says, "We need to take all the good stuff from Silicon Valley and repurpose it locally. While there are a lot of cities aspiring to become Silicon Valley, very few have a genuine shot at replicating the magic of the Valley – and Australia is one of them." Nitro’s Director of Operations, Gina O’Reilly, echoes a similar view: "We need to create an ecosystem of our own. We can take the good from other environments like Silicon Valley, but we have to create our own flavour of it."

Michael Brown, General Partner at Battery, said: "Every business deals with documents and knows the pain points in effectively sharing them and using them to collaborate with others. Both offline and online, Nitro is helping to solve these universal problems. It’s exciting to think that we’ve only just scratched the surface of this significant market opportunity and Battery is delighted to partner with the Nitro team to deliver on the company’s vision of bringing smarter documents to everyone."

Tools like Nitro are absolutely a no-brainer for a modern, mobile, distributed and agile workforce. There’s not much to say beyond that – Battery have made a wise choice.

"In terms of competing, we’re carving out our own space, and we are already a profitable business so we know how to sustainably compete, but a bigger balance sheet always helps." says Chandler.

"For sharing, collaborating, and signing, we have a unique offering with powerful features to help companies work smarter; and you can get all these features from one Nitro solution, rather than multiple vendors,” Nitro CEO Sam Chandler said in an e-mail to Xconomy. “We are proud to have what we believe are the easiest to use and easiest to deploy products in the market today."

Sam Chandler, Nitro’s Founder and CEO, said: "This investment allows us to bring our ‘Smart Documents’ vision to life for organisations of all sizes. We want to help our customers close contracts faster, save money, collaborate more efficiently, modernise their document processes, and do it all more elegantly and securely than the old ways of paper and email. We’re delighted to have a partner of Battery’s caliber coming aboard."

Nitro will use the funds to accelerate growth, drive innovation and adoption of its new Nitro Cloud offering, and continue its international expansion with a particular emphasis on developing the EMEA team in Dublin.

"With 30 employees and a new larger Dublin office on One Grand Parade now in place, the expansion in Europe has coincided with over 50pc growth in EMEA customers since opening the Dublin office at the Web Summit last year."

Mr Gilmore said that Nitro was in “due diligence” to build the firm’s first data centre outside the United States in Ireland. “We have the green-light from our board to do this. It will be a multimillion investment in a location to be decided,” Mr Gilmore said.

“Nitro’s donation of technology equipment will help us improve that integration and better bring technology into the education of our students.”

Many companies have prioritized at least some of these architectural elements, but could benefit even more by going reactive from end to end. I believe there are three huge advantages to be gained from being proactive about reactive application engineering.

Chandler says as a member of the European Union, and because of the large number of successful startups based there, you can recruit 100 skilled people really quickly. Something Nitro is looking to do in Dublin over the next 12-18 months.

I think this work hard, play hard mantra – the ability to be driven and still have a laugh – is ultimately why I’ve chosen to work for an Aussie company in the Valley. It’s challenging, it’s exciting, it’s rewarding…and it’s all in good fun.

Gina O’Reilly, the San Francisco-based company’s chief operations officer, said part of the goal with the 90-day contract is to establish a culture around constant performance measures and feedback in the minds of employees. The goal is to narrow the gap between what employees say they can achieve and what is actually delivered.

In principle, different rights management products work similarly to encrypt and manage access to documents, allowing the sender to maintain control of source files at all times. They allow users to manage documents and users from anywhere, authenticate every open or print attempt, and delegate user and document access.

As a rite of passage, each new Nitronaut is required to take a lap around the office pushing the beer cart, which is a great opportunity for them to meet the broader team while sharing a cold drink to kick off the weekend.

The philosophy is simple. If you take care of employees, they will take care of the company. “I care about everybody here,” said Johnson. “In addition, healthy, happy employees work better and, as a result, that helps the business. Happy employees help the bottom line.”

The 2014 Rising Star award adds to a string of accolades for Nitro this year, with Chandler taking the top gong at the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Southern Region Awards in the emerging category last month. Nitro also recently claimed the #2 spot in the JobAdvisor list of Australia’s Coolest Tech Companies, beating out competition from a pool of more than 300 businesses.

Most smart professionals care more about finding a good culture fit in a company that values operational harmony and facilitates productivity. In other words, a workplace that allows them to get things done. But how can companies avoid the bureaucratic traps that so often stifle this efficiency?

What the judges said: “Competing against Adobe and gaining ground, mentoring approach to women, great corporate social responsibility program, and kitchen freebies!”

We don’t have an HR department. We turned old-school HR on its head and instead created Employee Experience (EX), a global function whose sole responsibility is to help make Nitro the best possible place to work.

What the judges said: “Nitro is an exciting business with enormous potential. Sam Chandler has already achieved significant wins, taking market share from more dominant and established global competitors. Sam leads the business with a clear vision and strong execution. He has also been able to attract top talent to Nitro, despite competition from some of the world’s leading technology companies.”

I’ve never understood why women are so under-represented in this industry, especially when you consider what we bring to the table in terms of complementary skills, not to mention our tremendous purchasing power.

Decide whether you want to be a small business or a high-growth company. They are different things. It’s not that one is better than the other — they are simply different. One key difference between the two types of business is your attitude to investment, says Sam Chandler.

The internet has recently been abuzz with stories about security – or lack thereof. Nitro, provider of document productivity and collaboration solutions, has announced a new integration with Microsoft RMS (Rights Management Service), which will provide enhanced security for document workflows.

Master your streams of work before they master you with these simple but vital strategies. Work streams often grind to a halt when a key document needs to be signed off, so it makes sense to handle them in the speediest, most efficient way possible, argues Mimi Hoang.

Australia's innovation funding environment is akin to having a great primary school system but no secondary schools or universities. Start-ups need a better go from the public and private sector, including superannuation funds, argues Sam Chandler.

Australia's innovation funding environment is akin to having a great primary school system but no secondary schools or universities. Start-ups need a better go from the public and private sector, including superannuation funds, argues Sam Chandler.

There are many good things about Microsoft Windows, but the ability to work with PDF documents is not one of them. You can view documents easily enough, but you need to look elsewhere if you want to actually do something useful with them. A while ago, awesome DocumentSnap reader Sherri-Lee Mathers from Balsam Way Bookkeeping turned me on to a program that she relies on for her paperless practice: Nitro Pro.

It's a pleasant surprise when I meet Sam Chandler clutching a glass of the amber nectar that's shortly to be replaced by another... and one for the thirsty interviewer. Chandler has earned his drop. He says he's midway through conducting 42 interviews for his document editing and sharing company, Nitro.

Sure, you can edit that PDF—for $299, if you pay Adobe for Acrobat's Standard edition. I don't think so. And the Pro edition costs $449. Arguably the second-biggest name in PDF editing, Nitro is a venerable and mature editor with plenty to recommend. However, at $140, it's on the pricey side considering the many sub-$100 products in this field.

Document sharing solution provider Nitro wants to give Adobe, the biggest player in PDF software, some stiff competition. So says Sam Chandler, CEO of the San Francisco headquartered firm that he started in Australia back in 2005 and which now has more than 490,000 business customers and eight million monthly users.

The key to Nitro's rapid growth is a determination to give businesses a tool to use PDF documents as a platform for enterprise-wide teamwork, Chandler told me: “Our view was the majority of people around the world were just viewing documents rather than collaborating with them.”

Technology firm Nitro, which set up in Ireland last year, expects to at least double the number of jobs it initially hoped to create at its Dublin office. The company, which offers document productivity products to rival Adobe and DocuSign, said it planned to create more than 100 jobs at its European, Middle East and Africa headquarters in Ireland, with the potential to expand that up to 150 positions.

Nitro has been leading the "Acrobat alternative" crowd for a long time now, with regular feature upgrades and offerings that keep setting it apart. With many great features available through its free product options, it's perfect for casual PDF makers while delivering the more advanced goods that make power users happy to pay to upgrade.