Playbook, a startup considered to be the creative file manager for designers, has reportedly secured a Series A funding round of USD 18 million led by Bain Capital Ventures.
Jessica Ko, the Chief Executive Officer of Playbook, started the company to resolve the problem of looking for assets around Dropbox.
She aimed at creating file storage for modern design processes and workflows. She intended to develop new cloud storage for creatives that would be seen as an alternative to Google Drive and Dropbox.
Ko noted that conventional cloud storage firms failed freelancers and brand design teams. It is confusing to share when designers must deal with nested folders. It resulted in a lot of design recreations.
By 2020, Ko collaborated with CTO Alex Zirbel to officially start Playbook. The company raised a seed round of USD 4 million last August which was led by Founders Fund valuing the company at USD 20 million. However, Ko did not reveal the valuation of the company after raising this round.
Founders Fund doubled its investment, also injecting money in the recent round with Hyphen Capital, Maple VC, Abstract Ventures, angel investor Elad Gil, and Blank Ventures.
According to Ko, Playbook is an easy-to-use sharing and cloud storage tool for designers and freelancers and implements technology like tagging images to videos and photos which turns a general file view into a Pinterest-like gallery.
It also consists of a suite of features targeting quick sharing and collaboration. In-built publishing tools enable users to convert a set of assets into a live sharing page with various templates.
Playbook searches across extracted text, image contents, and similar images using its machine learning platform.
The company intends to utilize its new funding to do some hiring and iterate on its product. Currently, Playbook has only 14 employees, including five contractors and nine full-time staff.
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