Creative Force – a leading end-to-end creative operations workflow platform for e-commerce retailers and brands – recently announced it has raised $8.9 million in Series A funding from Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO) and Hearst Ventures (the global venture capital division of Hearst). The new funding round brings Creative Force’s total funding to $17.9 million.
Creative Force will use the funding to scale its Danish headquarters and new U.S. office in Boston and integrate generative artificial intelligence (AI) into its platform, empowering retailers and brands to harness the capabilities of AI in their creative workflows and produce superior content that is on-brief, on time and on budget.
Statista forecasts global e-commerce sales to reach $8.1 trillion by 2026, and companies must produce increasingly copious amounts of content at scale to promote new products, entice customers, drive sales, and remain competitive. Historically brands outsourced content production to multiple vendors or struggled to handle it internally.
The workflow to produce creative content includes everything from conducting numerous photo shoots, producing videos, scanning product sample barcodes, creating 3D models, copywriting, internal/external coordination, booking models, art direction, editorial oversight, file management, post-production, retailer or channel signoff, etc.
Creative Force’s cloud-based and end-to-end workflow platform reshapes and streamlines the paradigm. And the company provides a single source of truth for all creative assets through every step of content production, giving brands unparalleled visibility and control over their creative operations.
So Creative Force helps large brands and studios produce new content in less time and launch products faster, avoid mistakes, reshoots and manual data entry, improve communication and collaboration throughout the entire content production process, maintain high quality and enforce creative consistency, and increase efficiency by more than 30%. The Creative Force platform also easily integrates with popular creative software, including Capture One, Adobe Creative Cloud and Adobe Workfront.
Launched in November 2019, Creative Force handled more than 10 million creative assets through its platform in the past year and has been quietly building its technology and working with some of the world’s biggest brands, such as Columbia Sportswear, OTTO, ALDO, David Yurman, Tommy Bahama, and others.
KEY QUOTES:
“Creative Force will help retailers and brands increase their creative production tenfold. We offer the only platform that manages the entire e-commerce content production workflow from end-to-end, so we are in a unique position to leverage generative AI to drive innovation at all stages of production, from planning to final file delivery. The investment from Hearst Ventures and EIFO will enable us to scale and holistically solve a perennial content production challenge, enabling brands to focus more on creativity and business goals.”
— Thomas Kragelund, CEO and co-founder of Creative Force
“Creative Force is poised to reshape the landscape of e-commerce content creation. The company’s goal of empowering creative teams to transition from cost centers to value-add contributors within their enterprises, amplified by AI innovation that is mindful of the rights of IP holders, promises an exciting future where brands and retailers can drive sales increases and enhance customer experiences in an increasingly digital world.”
— Megumi Ikeda, managing director at Hearst Ventures
“EIFO is expanding investment to growth-stage tech companies. We have a longstanding relationship with the seasoned entrepreneurs at Creative Force, and this fuels our confidence in the company’s growth potential.”
— Jacob Bratting Pedersen, partner at EIFO
