Tag: collaboration software

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Collaboration platform CloudApp raises $9.3M to enhance workplace productivity

Visual work communication tool CloudApp has raised $9.3 million in Series A funding led by Grayhawk Capital and Nordic Eye. The round also includes previous investors Kickstart Fund, Cervin Ventures, New Ground Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and new entrants Peninsula Ventures & Forward VC. It also features CloudApp customers Peter Kazanjy, the CRO of Atrium, and Derek Andersen, the CEO of Startup Grind and Bevy.

Founded in 2015, CloudApp aims to help teams share information faster through instantly shareable videos, gifs and screenshots. The tool is an all-in-one screen recording software that captures and embeds HD video, marked-up images and more into workflows. Every file users create is securely stored in the cloud, and accessible via CloudApp’s native Mac and Windows Apps, or shareable on the web through secure password-protected links.

The goal of the company is to help teams avoid having to schedule extra calls or emails and instead communicate their message through simple shareable videos. CloudApp sees itself as a visual voicemail that can be read at any time without disrupting workflows. The tool supports dozens of integrations including Slack, Atlassian, Trello, Zendesk and Asana. Since its launch, CloudApp has garnered more than four million total users. Notable CloudApp clients include Adobe, Uber, Zendesk and Salesforce.

CloudApp CEO Scott Smith told TechCrunch in an email that the company will use this latest investment to make the tool faster, more deeply integrated and secure. The startup also wants to help more teams discover and use CloudApp to enhance their workplace productivity.

Image Credits: CloudApp

“To accomplish those goals, we need some more of what we already have: awesome people,” Smith said. “We plan to build out our product and engineering teams to continue increasing our speed and user experience. Marketing will be another key focus, as we work towards making sure every workplace has CloudApp as an indispensable part of its workflow. We’ll continue scaling our successful sales team to bring CloudApp right to the teams that need it the most.”

In terms of the future, Smith says CloudApp envisions a world where employee and customer interactions will become instantly more searchable and shareable than ever. He noted that artificial intelligence can help surface the most relevant and significant content, which makes CloudApp’s vision possible.

“We see CloudApp initially as an incredibly easy and fast way to capture what you need to share. Knowledge is power, so teams can then build out repositories of content and quick-help videos that can be used throughout workflows and integrations to help all parts of an organization: sales, support, product, engineering teams, etc,” Smith wrote. “Asynchronous work is the future, and CloudApp can help every team member become a more productive, superhuman version of themselves.”

CloudApp’s Series A funding follows its $4.3 million seed investment announced in May 2019. The round was led by Kickstart Seed Fund and also included previous investors Cervin Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Kyle York, who was the vice president of strategy at Oracle, at the time.

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Microsoft acquires video creation and editing software maker Clipchamp

Video editing software may become the next big addition to Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced it’s acquiring Clipchamp, a company offering web-based video creation and editing software that allows anyone to put together video presentations, promos or videos meant for social media destinations like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. According to Microsoft, Clipchamp is a “natural fit” to extend its exiting productivity experiences in Microsoft 365 for families, schools, and businesses.

The acquisition appealed to Microsoft for a few reasons. Today, more people are creating and using video, thanks to a growing set of new tools that allow anyone — even non-professionals — to quickly and easily perform advanced edits and produce quality video content. This, explains Microsoft, has allowed video to establish itself as a new type of “document” for businesses to do things like pitch an idea, explain a process, or communicate with team members.

The company also saw Clipchamp as an interesting acquisition target due to how it combined “the simplicity of a web app with the full computing power of a PC with graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration,” it said. That makes the software a good fit for the Microsoft Windows customer base, as well.

Clipchamp itself had built a number of online tools in the video creation and editing space, including its video maker Clipchamp Create, which offers features for trimming, cutting, cropping, rotating, speed control, and adding text, audio, images, colors, and filters. It also provides other tools that make video creation easier, like templates, free stock video and audio libraries, screen recorders, text-to-speech tools, and others for simplifying a brand’s fonts, colors and logos for use in video. A discontinued set of utilities called Clipchamp Utilities had once included a video compressor and converters, as well as an in-browser webcam recorder. Some of this functionality was migrated over to the new Clipchamp app, however.

After producing the videos with Clipchamp, creators can choose between different output styles and aspect ratios for popular social media networks, making it a popular tool for online marketers.

Image Credits: Clipchamp

Since its founding in 2013, Clipchamp grew to attract over 17 million registered users and has served over 390,000 companies, growing at a rate of 54% year-over-year. As the pandemic forced more organizations towards remote work, the use of video has grown as companies adopted the medium for training, communication, reports, and more. During the first half of 2021, Clipchamp saw a 186% increase in video exports. Videos using the 16:9 aspect ratio grew by 189% while the 9:16 aspect ratio for sharing to places like Instagram Stories and TikTok grew by 140% and the 1:1 aspect ratio for Instagram grew 72%. Screen recording also grew 57% and webcam recording grew 65%.

In July, Clipchamp CEO Alexander Dreiling commented on this growth, noting the company had nearly tripled its team over the past year.

“We are acquiring two times more users on average than we did at the same time a year ago while also doubling the usage rate, meaning more users are creating video content than ever before. While social media videos have always been at the forefront of business needs, during the past year we’ve also witnessed the rapid adoption of internal communication use cases where there is a lot of screen and webcam recording taking place in our platform,” he said.

Microsoft didn’t disclose the acquisition price, but Clipchamp had raised over $15 million in funding according to Crunchbase.

This is not Microsoft’s first attempt at entering the video market.

The company was recently one of the suitors pursuing TikTok when the Trump administration was working to force a sale of the China-owned video social network which Trump had dubbed a national security threat. (In order to keep TikTok running in the U.S., ByteDance would have needed to have divested TikTok’s U.S. operations. But that sale never came to be as the Biden administration paused the effort.) Several years ago, Microsoft also launched a business video service called Stream, that aimed to allow enterprises to use video as easily as consumers use YouTube. In 2018, it acquired social learning platform Flipgrid, which used short video clips for collaboration. And as remote work became the norm, Microsoft has been adding more video capabilities to its team collaboration software, Microsoft Teams, too.

Microsoft’s deal follows Adobe’s recent $1.28 acquisition of the video review and collaboration platform Frame.io, which has been used by over a million people since its founding in 2014. However, unlike Clipchamp, whose tools are meant for anyone to use at work, school, or home, Frame.io is aimed more directly at creative professionals.

Dreiling said Clipchamp will continue to grow at Microsoft, with a focus on making video editing accessible to more people.

“Few companies in tech have the legacy and reach that Microsoft has. We all grew up with iconic Microsoft products and have been using them ever since,” he explained. “Becoming part of Microsoft allows us to become part of a future legacy. Under no other scenario could our future look more exciting than what’s ahead of us now. At Clipchamp we have always said that we’re not suffering from a lack of opportunity, there absolutely is an abundance of opportunity in video. We just need to figure out how to seize it. Inside Microsoft we can approach seizing our opportunity in entirely new ways,” Dreiling added.

Microsoft did not say when it expected to integrate Clipchamp into its existing software suite, saying it would share more at a later date.

 

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Atlanta’s early stage investment renaissance continues with Overline’s $27 million fund close

Michael Cohn became a celebrity in the Atlanta startup ecosystem when the company he co-founded was sold to Accenture in a deal valued somewhere between $350 million and $400 million nearly six years ago.

That same year, Sean O’Brien also made waves in the community when he helped shepherd the sale of the  collaboration software vendor, PGi, to a private equity firm for $1.5 billion.

The two men are now looking to become fixtures in the city’s burgeoning new tech community with the close of their seed-stage venture capital firm’s first fund, a $27.4 million investment vehicle.

Overline’s first fund has already made commitments to companies that are expanding the parameters of what’s investible in the Southeast broadly and Atlanta’s startup scene locally.

These are companies like Grubbly Farms, which sells insect-based chicken feed for backyard farmers, or Kayhan Space, which is aiming to be the air traffic control service for the space industry. Others, like Padsplit, an Atlanta-based flexible housing marketplace, are tackling America’s low income housing crisis. 

“Our business model is very different from that of a traditional software startup, and the Overline team’s unique strengths and operator mindset have been invaluable in helping us grow the company,” said Sean Warner, CEO and co-founder of Grubbly Farms. 

Kayhan Space wants to be the air traffic control service for satellites in space

That’s on top of investments into companies building on Atlanta’s natural strengths as a financial services, payments and business software powerhouse.

For all of the activity in Atlanta these days, the city and the broader southeastern region is still massively underfunded, according to O’brien and Cohn. The region only received less than 10 percent of all the institutional venture investments that were committed in 2020. Indeed, only seven percent of Atlanta founders raise money locally when they’re first starting out, an Overline survey suggested.

“The data reflects what we have seen throughout our careers building, growing, and investing in startups. There is no shortage of phenomenal founders and businesses coming out of Atlanta and the Southeast, but they often struggle to find institutional capital at their earliest stages,” said O’Brien, in a statement. “Overline will lead as the first institutional check for these companies and be a true partner to the Founders throughout their lifecycle—supporting them on the strategic and operational business initiatives and decisions that are critical to a company’s success.” 

The limited partners in Overline’s first fund also reflects the firm’s emphasis on regional roots. The privately held email marketing behemoth Mailchimp anchored the fund, which also included partners like Cox Enterprises, Social Leverage,

Overline is supported by a bench of impressive partners that reflects the firm’s roots in the Southeast. Anchored by marketing platform, Mailchimp, additional partners include Cox Enterprises, Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Social Leverage, Wilmington, Del.-based Hallett Capital, and Atlanta Tech Village founder David Cummings, along with Techstars co-founder David Cohen. 

“At Mailchimp, we love our hometown of Atlanta, and are proud of the robust startup ecosystem that’s growing in our city. The Overline founding team’s vision of deploying smart, local capital into startups in Atlanta and the Southeast aligns with our goals of promoting and advancing local innovation,” said Rick Lynch, CFO, Mailchimp, in a statement.

The firm expects to make investments of between $250,000 to $1.5 million into seed stage companies and has already backed 11 companies including, Relay Payments, a logistics fintech company that has raised over $40 million from top-tier investors. 

“When we set out to build Atlanta Tech Village almost a decade ago, one of our primary goals was to help Atlanta develop into a top 10 startup city, where all entrepreneurs would thrive. We’re making tremendous strides as a community, as evidenced by the number of newly minted unicorns,” said serial entrepreneur and Atlanta Tech Village founder David Cummings. “I believe in Overline’s thesis that value-add institutional early-stage capital is critical to the ecosystem’s continued development. Since the early days, Michael and Sean have been an active presence in our community in a way that goes far beyond being a source of capital—as mentors, advisors, and champions of Atlanta founders. I am proud to be one of their first investors.”

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Join us Wednesday, September 9 to watch Techstars Starburst Space Accelerator Demo Day live

The 2020 class of Techstars’ Starburst Space Accelerator are graduating with an official Demo Day on Wednesday at 10 AM PT (1 PM ET), and you can watch all the teams present their startups live via the stream above. This year’s class includes 10 companies building innovative new solutions to challenges either directly or indirectly related to commercial space.

Techstars Starburst is a program with a lot of heavyweight backing from both private industry and public agencies, including from NASA’s JPL, the U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Technologies, SAIC, Israel Aerospace Industries North America, and The Aerospace Corporation. The program, led by Managing Director Matt Kozlov, is usually based locally in LA, where much of the space industry has significant presence, but this year the Demo Day is going online due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation.

Few, if any, programs out there can claim such a broad representation of big-name partners from across commercial, military and general civil space in terms of stakeholders, which is the main reason it manages to attract a range of interesting startups.  This is the second class of graduating startups from the Starburst Space Accelerator; last year’s batch included some exceptional standouts like on-orbit refuelling company Orbit Fab (also a TechCrunch Battlefield participant), imaging micro-satellite company Pixxel and satellite propulsion company Morpheus.

As for this year’s class, you can check out a full list of all ten participating companies below. The demo day presentations begin tomorrow, September 9 at 10 AM PT/1 PM PT, so you can check back in here then to watch live as they provide more details about what it is they do.

Bifrost

A synthetic data API that allows AI teams to generate their own custom datasets up to 99% faster – no tedious collection, curation or labelling required.
founders@bifrost.ai

Holos Inc.

A virtual reality content management system that makes it super easy for curriculum designers to create and deploy immersive learning experiences.
founders@holos.io

Infinite Composites Technologies

The most efficient gas storage systems in the universe.
founders@infinitecomposites.com

Lux Semiconductors

Lux is developing next generation System-on-Foil electronics.
founders@luxsemiconductors.com

Natural Intelligence Systems, Inc.

Developer of next generation pattern based AI/ML systems.
leadership@naturalintelligence.ai

Prewitt Ridge

Engineering collaboration software for teams building challenging deep tech projects.
founders@prewittridge.com

SATIM

Providing satellite radar-based intelligence for decision makers.
founders@satim.pl

Urban Sky

Developing stratospheric Microballoons to capture the freshest, high-res earth observation data.
founders@urbansky.space

vRotors

Real-time remote robotic controls.
founders@vrotors.com

WeavAir

Proactive air insights.
founders@weavair.com

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Tokyo-based collaboration platform BeaTrust lands $2.8 million seed round

BeaTrust co-founder Masato Kume, co-founder and chief executive officer Kunio Hara and Ryo Nagaoka, vice president of engineering


Founded just four months ago, Tokyo-based BeaTrust has raised a JPY 300 million (about USD $2.83 million) seed round for its enterprise collaboration platform. The startup’s ambitious goal is to change corporate culture at large Japanese companies before expanding into other countries.

The round came from CyberAgent Capital; DNX Ventures; ITOCHU Technology Ventures; STRIVE; One Capital; Delight Ventures; PKSHA/SPARX Algorithm 1st; and Mizuho Capital, along with undisclosed individual participants.

BeaTrust’s platform allows employees at large companies to discover colleagues in different departments with similar interests and skills, and gives them tools to work together on projects.

The startup’s co-founders, Kunio Hara and Masato Kume, met while working at Google in Japan. Before Google, Hara held positions in Tokyo and Silicon Valley at Sumitomo Corporation, Softbank, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft, while Kume worked at Asatsu-DK. During their time at Google, the two focused on helping Japanese startups scale by using Google’s tools.

Hara told TechCrunch that BeaTrust was inspired by his experience working at companies in the United States and Japan, and by the co-founders’ time at Google, where they found cross-department collaboration was an intrinsic part of the culture. The two began to think about how they could bring the same qualities to large Japanese corporations.

“From the standpoint of employees at Google, working there is like a lifestyle. We work together and think about how to facilitate cross-cultural innovation among employees, and that needs a communication and digital infrastructure to support those ideas,” said Hara.

BeaTrust wants to transform Japanese corporate culture, which Hara described as “very siloed and top-down, with very strict rules,” making it harder for people in different teams or departments to communicate or even get to know one another. “There are a lot of initiatives to hire talented people, but it’s not an environment that helps people connect with one another and ask each other for help, which is what leads to new projects,” he added.

The platform is currently in closed beta stage, testing with three late-stage startups that have about 100 to 200 employees each. Its first feature is employee profiles that list skills and experience. Next, BeaTrust will launch tools for users to visualize how teams at their company are organized and modules to enable collaboration on different kinds of projects, including software development.

BeaTrust’s founders said as the platform grows, its target audience will be large enterprises with thousands of employees. The platform is not meant to be a replacement for Slack, which launched in Japan three years ago, or other enterprise communication tools like Microsoft Teams or ChatWork, but serve as a complement, Kume said. Slack and its competitors are meant to enable individual teams within large companies to collaborate, while BeaTrust is designed to help employees discover and strike up working relationships with colleagues they don’t know yet.

While its initial goal is to reshape corporate culture in Japan, BeaTrust founders are also eyeing expansion into European and Asian countries, and markets where large companies are continuing to mandate or encourage remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“That’s becoming imperative for us because what we hear from a lot of large enterprises is that employees are not used to working remotely, so they need to think about how to shift their lifestyle and continue employee innovation,” Kume said.