This week, Brooklyn-based cloud collaboration startup Air announced it closed on a $12 million Series A round led by Tiger Global, bringing its total funding raised to $18 million.
Launched in March, Air makes it easier to store and share visual content like photos, spreadsheets and other documents, allowing disparate teams to more efficiently organize their work and collaborate without the mess of email attachments and text messages. Plus, unlike tools like Dropbox or Google Drive, the platform allows users to easily search, review and manage all the content stored. Air claims to have thousands of users on its site.
With more people working from home amid the pandemic, a tool like Air is more important than ever. However, founder and CEO Shane Hegde lamented in a recent blog post that the past several months have not been easy. In the 42 days it took to arrive at this deal, the Air team took more than 130 meetings with dozens of investment firms. The company also had to lay off 16 percent of its staff and move out of its office to preserve cash.
“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,” Hegde wrote. “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.”
Now, Air plans to use this fresh funding to invest heavily in product development. The company is also going to “rapidly expand” its team, and currently has a handful of open positions across its product and growth departments on its site.
Hegde also said in October the company will publish a new diversity and inclusion report, claiming industry standards are not enough. Then, over the next year, Air plans to have new pricing tiers.
“On Air, instant creative collaboration will be made possible from the first mood board to the final deliverable,” Hegde wrote. “New York demands a lot of you — energy, attitude, personality — but this sense of resolve is what I cherish most. Many people on our team ditched their apartments post-close, and I’m honestly unsure when we’ll have an office again. But if I’m confident about anything, it’s that we’ll be back in New York.”
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