A Boulder-based startup that helps creative agencies transition their work to the cloud is expanding thanks to a multimillion-dollar shot in the arm.

Suite Studios, the company that provides a cloud-based workstation for creative agencies, raised $3.5 million in seed funding to grow its staff and further develop its platform, the company announced Tuesday.

California-based Bonfire Ventures, which focuses on seed-stage startups, led the round. Also participating were angel investors and Range Ventures, a venture firm based in Denver.

The announcement comes one year after Suite Studios first made its technology available to post-production teams. The company claims that its platform is the simplest way for creative agencies to transition their workflows onto the cloud and negates the need for on-premise hardware.

According to Suite Studios, it has experienced 60% revenue growth month-over-month since launching the platform in February 2022. It can shift agencies from working completely on-premises to using only cloud-based workflows within three months, said co-founder and CEO Craig Hering. In the year since it launched, the company has worked with boutique creative agencies, marketing agencies and visual effects and animation studios across the United States.

"There's a lot of confusion and complexity that tends to come along with shifting your team to a cloud-based workflow, and that's why we're here," Hering said. "Our customers love creating content, and the stuff they do is amazing. They're not experts in cloud-based infrastructure. That's why we exist, to make that transition as simple as possible."

Hering started his career as a creative director at a post-production studio in Miami that developed commercials and corporate messaging. Because the studio worked with massive file sizes and hadn't shifted to using cloud computing, hard drives had to be shipped to different states and countries in order for projects to be completed. Hering was shipping about 15 to 20 hard drives every day, he said.

The process, which Hering described as "archaic," inspired his idea for a platform in which studios could share projects in real-time with entire teams and clients.

"I was very much in the world of the customers that we're serving today and had a lot of firsthand experience with the problems they're dealing with," Hering said. "Creative teams don't want to spend all their time shipping hard drives and managing workflows."

Suite Studios, a startup based in Boulder, raised $3.5 million in seed funding to help creative agencies shift to cloud computing.

Hering's brother, Mike Hering, is a software engineer and a graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder. Along with co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jay Maxwell, the brothers founded Suite Studios in 2021, and Craig Hering moved to Boulder to establish the company.

Suite Studios launched its platform in 2022 on a pay-for-what-you-need model, in which its customers get cloud-based storage and computing power that can be adjusted to meet the demands of their workflows. The platform allows clients to use whatever design tools they already have, including Adobe, DaVinci and Unreal Engine, among others.

Brett Queener, a managing director at Bonfire Ventures, said the firm became interested in Suite Studios because of its potential to work with thousands of creative agencies in the United States that haven't shifted onto a cloud-based workstation and are struggling to invest money into hardware. The company's platform could create a more equal playing field for small agencies to compete for big projects, Queener said.

One of Suite Studios' clients is Hometeam, a boutique video production company based in Toronto. Dan Tundis, Hometeam's director of post-production, said in a statement that the platform had "transformed the way our teams manage their workflows."

The co-founders plan to use their seed funding to add to their team. Before closing the round, Suite Studios employed six people. It has since grown its staff to 14, and the company plans to add several other positions before the end of 2023. As of Tuesday, it had openings for a content creator and business development representative.

"Suite is growing very fast, and with this investment, we'd like them to build out the team and generate the revenue that's required for the next couple of years for them to be successful," Queener said.

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Originally seen on Colorado Inno - Denver Business Journal by Nikki Wentling - Reporter

February 14, 2023, 07:19am MST

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