Dropmyemail picks Texas over Silicon Valley for US office. Here’s why…

Dropmyemail, a Singapore-based startup that backups emails in the cloud, has opened a sales and business development office in Dallas, Texas — an unusual location since Silicon Valley is frequently the first choice for tech startups.

Their reason for doing so? Dallas is the beating heart of the telecommunications industry in the United States. It’s Telecom Corridor houses the global headquarters of AT&T and the regional and global offices of Samsung Telecoms, Texas Instruments, and more.

These are companies that Dropmyemail hopes to collaborate with. John Fearon, CEO and founder of Dropmyemail, is aiming to secure US mobile partners to push their cloud email backup service to consumers. He stated in a press release that Samsung and AT&T are looking seriously at the startup’s services.

“We have found that telecommunications companies globally are interested in bringing our solutions to their vast base of consumer customers to help back up their emails and phone data,” said John.

The exact form a partnership could take remains unclear at this point, but what’s certain is that mobile is certainly a big target in the startup’s sights. A telecoms operator could have a future Dropmyemail app pre-installed on phones, or it could offer backup services as part of a monthly data plan. The company definitely wants to go beyond email backups — it aims to move into things like calenders, phone books, social networks, and so on.

The new Dallas office is the next phase of its expansion into North America. Its first step involved the acquisition of US-based OrbitFiles, a cloud backup and sharing site, and its 235,000 sign-ups. This brought Dropmyemail to a theoretical user base of 911,000. Of course, the actual figure depends very much on the conversion rate of OrbitFiles users to Dropmyemail.

Prior to Dallas, Dropmyemail had set up international offices in Mumbai and Buenos Aires. The startup also has plans to open more offices in the US in cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, as well as establish a presence in the European, Middle East, and African regions (EMEA).

The startup has certainly become very good at hiring talent from prominent tech companies. Running the Dallas office is Chris Axberg, Dropmyemail’s head of North America. He was the ex-Yahoo South East Asia regional director.

Leading Dropmyemail’s charge into EMEA is Charif El Ansari. He was formerly Google’s Southeast Asia business development head.