End-to-end workplace collaboration tool powering 100+ brands like Glamsquad, The Infatuation, & Duke Men’s Basketball
Air, a workplace collaboration tool, announced it has raised $6M funding to date, to build brands a replacement for their messy cloud storage solutions. Lerer Hippeau is the lead and is joined by RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital, WndrCo, and a group of 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).
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Today’s announcement also marks the launch of Air’s end-to-end software product designed to help the 700 million “communicators” that work in fields like marketing, sales, and partnerships. For these individuals, visual collaboration is critical, but their creative assets are locked in the hidden corners and messy folders of cloud storage. Using Air, teams optimize their creative process: importing thousands of images and videos from Dropbox or Google Drive on sign up, giving back on average four hours of their workday. Manual tasks are replaced with automated structure, and seamless workflow tools enable sharing, commenting, and instant collaboration.
“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,” says Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau. “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.”
“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,” says Shane Hegde CEO & Co-Founder at Air. “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.”
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“The need for great media management tools has never been greater, says Todd Jackson, Former VP of Product at Dropbox. 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.”
“Dropbox made it difficult for our team to search and index,” says David Goldweitz, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Glamsquad. “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,” said Goldweitz. “Our marketing, growth, and product teams all have real-time access to new assets, so the team can move faster with cleaner communication.”
At just $10/user/mo, Air is the first piece of media-specific software that teams purchase and 95% of customers migrate from Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive. Since launching their closed, invite-only pilot in 2019, Air has grown to manage over 5M digital assets for brand- forward businesses around the globe. The product is referred to as a “whiteboard for the creative process” as it immediately increases productivity for end users like brand marketing managers, content coordinators, and social media managers. 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. The product currently serves over 100 teams in consumer products, goods and services, sports, media, retail, and hospitality. At its core, Air believes every company needs a space to think visually.
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