34. VentralP Australia Pty Ltd

Revenue: $6.5 million
Growth: 147.24%
Founders: Angelo Giuffrida, 30, Cheyne Jonstone
Head office: Victoria
Year founded: 2010
Employees: 28
Industry: Information and communication technology
Website: ventraip.com.au

A new entrant to the Smart50, IT company VentraIP Australia Pty Ltd began when founders Angelo Giuffrida and Cheyne Jonstone saw a gap in the market for an IT provider that specialised in automating solutions for customers online, while providing better customer service and technical support.

Since it began operating in 2010, VentralP has developed its in-house system to automate many functions that its competitors require human intervention for.

“We also set out from the beginning to expand our operations to the wholesale market in order to become the wholesale partner we would like to work with ourselves,” Giuffrida says.

VentraIP now turns over more than $6.5 million but it reached the $1 million revenue mark in its first year of trading and, now in its fifth year, boasts a customer base of around 75,000 customers.

Recent growth has seen the business expand its workforce with five new employees taken on in the past year.

The company was started with less than $50,000 in startup costs and had to initially overcome the challenge of gaining traction in an over-saturated market, Giuffrida says.

“We learned very early on that it was going to be a challenge convincing the market and other competitors that we were a serious contender and not a fly-by-night operation as many web-hosting businesses become,” he says.

An early challenge for the business was the signs of stress on the infrastructure that followed a period of “exceptional growth”, Guiffrida says. And this was compounded by issues such as unscheduled outages in data centres.

“It was solved by partnering with new vendors for our data centres and infrastructure,” he says.

“We invested more than $1.5 million … As a result, customer satisfaction with the quality of the service we provide and our uptime averages have never been higher.”

Guiffrida says VentralP plans to enter a “new area” of the market in the next 12 months, by leveraging existing customers and possible acquisitions also on the cards.