Today is an incredible day for Frame.io. After winning an Apple Design Award in June and attracting close to 200,000 creative professionals from all over the world to sign up for our platform, we’re thrilled to announce a $10M Series A investment.
Led by Accel Partners with participation from SignalFire, FirstMark Capital, and Shasta Ventures, the round will help us continue on our mission to build better collaboration tools for the video and creative industry.
Jared Leto will be adding to his seed investment and joining our advisory board. I’ve had the opportunity to get to know Jared over the past year, and not only is he the incredible actor known for his versatility and the rockstar frontman of Thirty Seconds to Mars, he’s also an active filmmaker with a keen design/product sense.
We’re also excited to bring on industry leaders and creative visionaries as strategic investors, including Bob Pittman (founder of MTV, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, Inc.), and Greg Silverman (President at Warner Bros.). Our strategic investors bring decades of experience dealing with the problems we are working to solve, and we look forward to having them onboard as a source of inspiration and guidance.
My co-founder John Traver and I actually started building Frame.io as an internal tool at my previous company. I owned a post-production company in New York City that worked on a wide range of television commercials and 100 digital shorts for Saturday Night Live. I’ve been a professional filmmaker for nearly 14 years and it’s frustrating to see how underserved our market is. Sure we have cool desktop tools like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro X and new distribution channels like YouTube, Vimeo, and Netflix. But that’s where the innovation stops. Great video is created by teams of specialists in multiple disciplines. There’s very little software being built to help us work better together, removing the barriers to collaboration so we can focus on what we do best. The software that does exist certainly isn’t being built by people who deeply understand how video gets made. We’ve been stuck collaborating with a mishmash of consumer software solutions that were designed for a totally different purpose.
So what exactly are we going to do with $10M dollars? Buy ourselves fancy condos in New York City? Hire a ton of sales and marketing people? Absolutely not. This capital is not going to us, it’s going to you. We believe we will be successful only when we make you successful. We’re doubling down on our product, and almost all of the new funding will go towards hiring more engineers. Our goal is to build the best engineering organization in New York City, building the best software in the world with the efficiency and scale that a video collaboration platform demands.
The Frame.io you see and use today has only scratched the surface of our vision. Over the coming months you’ll start to see us move faster. More frequent product updates, more stability improvements, more speed improvements. Though we have many obstacles ahead of us, we’re excited for this next chapter in Frame.io history and look forward to tackling even bigger problems for all of you.
If you’re interested in being part of that journey with us, let us know. We’re hiring!
Sincerely,
Emery Wells – Co-Founder
