- Workplace collaboration tool company Air announced it raised $6 million in funding to date
Workplace collaboration tool company Air announced it raised $6 million in funding to date. The funding will be used to help brands build a replacement for messy cloud storage services. Lerer Hippeau is the lead investor in the company and they were joined by RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital, WndrCo, and several strategic advisors, including the former Head of Business Operations at Dropbox (ChenLi Wang), former VP of Product at Dropbox (Todd Jackson), and Head of Sales at Figma and former Global Partnerships at Dropbox (Kyle Parrish).
This announcement also comes on the heels of the launch of Air’s end-to-end software product designed to help the 700 million communicators that work in fields such as marketing, sales, and partnerships. And for these individuals, visual collaboration is essential, but their creative assets are locked in the hidden corners and messy folders of cloud storage.
With Air, teams are able to optimize their creative process by importing thousands of images and videos from Dropbox or Google Drive on sign up. And manual tasks are replaced with automated structure, and seamless workflow tools enable sharing, commenting, and instant collaboration.
Air is priced at $10 per user per month. And it is considered the first piece of media-specific software that teams purchase and 95% of customers migrate from Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. And since launching its cloud and invite-only pilot in 2019, Air has grown to manage over 5 million digital assets for brand- forward businesses around the globe.
It is often referred to as a “whiteboard for the creative process” as it increases productivity for end users like brand marketing managers, content coordinators, and social media managers. Plus Air’s wide range of customers reinforce the idea that the world is visually driven and all industries now require images and videos in everyday operations.
Air currently serves over 100 teams in consumer products, goods and services, sports, media, retail, and hospitality. And at its core, Air believes every company needs a space to think visually.
Key Quotes:
“As more companies focus on creating and sharing visual content, social media marketers, sales leaders and content producers are on the frontline of the growing need for better collaboration tools. Shane and Tyler are the perfect pair to tackle this problem because they’ve worked in content and digital media and know this pain point first-hand. We believe Air will support creators everywhere with the platform to power an increasingly visual world.”
– Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau
“Building this product has been an ambitious undertaking and we’re thrilled to have a team of investors and advisors that believe in our long term vision. Today, every company is a media company and teams of all sizes need space to think creatively. Air dramatically improves the way people work. Tyler and I have spent our entire careers at the intersection of media and technology. We believe this market has been vastly underserved and we’re obsessed with improving the creative process: iterating and expanding our product based on real-time feedback.”
– Shane Hegde CEO & Co-Founder at Air
“The need for great media management tools has never been greater. Because of the internet and social media, every company needs to produce compelling visual content on a daily basis, and Air is the most elegant, modern tool for today’s companies.”
– Todd Jackson, Former VP of Product at Dropbox
“Dropbox made it difficult for our team to search and index. It was too easy for someone to accidentally duplicate or delete files, which we would then need to recover. With Air, there is no need to copy assets and it’s simple to share between internal users and partners… Our marketing, growth, and product teams all have real-time access to new assets, so the team can move faster with cleaner communication.”
– David Goldweitz, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Glamsquad
