Online booking venture Timely has earned new backing from the Punakaiki Fund, set up last year by director Lance Wiggs to back early stage Kiwi growth companies.

The fund and fellow new investors David and Nicki Wilson, who were early investors in cloud firms Xero and Vend, have together injected $1.3 million into Timely.

The funding will go to expanding the team, which currently numbers 10 in New Zealand and two in the UK office set up earlier this year. The company will also grow its sales and marketing, support and technical teams, says CEO Ryan Baker.

The immediate challenge is to get people with experience in the software-as-a-service industry, he says.

“SaaS is an emerging field. Old school ways of delivering this kind of software don’t cut it. We’ll be looking for people who have spent a couple of years working on other SaaS products, in a range of roles.”

Last year Timely won investment from technologist and Southgate Labs founder Rowan Simpson, also an investor in Xero, Vend and Fishpond.

Timely has customers in more than 40 countries and monthly sales grew more than 450 percent in the last year.

Baker and his co-founder Andrew Schofield previously started bookit.co.nz, which was acquired by Trade Me in 2010.