Cloud Collaboration Tool Company Air Raises $12 Million

By Annie Baker • Sep 19, 2020
  • Cloud collaboration tool company Air announced it has raised $12 million in a Series A round of funding led by Tiger Global

Cloud collaboration tool company Air announced it has raised $12 million in a Series A round of funding led by Tiger Global. Air is a relatively new company as it launched in February. And as COVID-19 has been forcing to transition to a remote workforce overnight. This requires new collaboration tools for this distributed environment. 

“ It took us 42 days of nonstop work to arrive at a term sheet. In that time period, we laid off 16% of our staff and moved out of our office to conserve cash. We passed on taking a PPP loan because it felt wrong. We took 136 meetings with 57 firms. Air’s “data room” was a +7,000 word Notion doc. Our preparation was a far cry from poetic and I’m pretty confident I went outside my apartment less than a dozen times from launch to terms. These factoids aren’t meant to sound like a holier-than-thou tweetstorm, they’re just an honest window into our lives this summer. It was brutal; I hated it, the team hated it, but we were sharing in the struggle and that’s what made this triumph exciting,” wrote Air CEO and co-founder Shane Hegde in a candid blog post.

How does Air work? Air’s workspace offers the ability for teams to organize, search, review, and manage visual content to drive brand experiences. And Air has attracted a diverse set of clients and creative use cases the team did not predict when building the product. Some of the clients include Duke Basketball, The Infatuation, and Glamsquad.

Including this round of funding, Air has raise $18 million from institutional investors including Tiger Global, Lerer Hippeau, WndrCo, Slack Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, R&R Venture Partners, and Advancit Capital. And the company’s angel network of executives include ChenLi Wang (Dropbox), Todd Jackson (Dropbox), Kyle Parrish (Figma), Sean Whitney (Figma), Joe Thomas (Loom), Jack Altman (Lattice), Jenny Fleiss (Rent the Runway), Nic Jammet (Sweetgreen), Brian Lee (Honest Co.), Nick Greenfield (Candid), Payne Brown (NBPA), David Goldweitz (Glamsquad), Oliver Jay (Asana), Kevin Weil (Instagram), and David Lieb (Google Photos).

With this round of funding, the company is planning to rapidly increase talent acquisition and invest heavily in product development.