Playbook Raises $18M Series A Led by Bain Capital Ventures

Fast-growing cloud storage and sharing platform built for creative professionals reaches 50,000 users and aims to bring its popular tool to millions more designers

SAN FRANCISCO, April 19, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Playbook, the first visual cloud storage platform built for creatives, today announced that it has closed $18 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Founders Fund, Abstract Ventures, Maple VC, Hyphen Capital, Blank Ventures, and strategic angel investor Elad Gil. The funding comes at a time of unprecedented growth for Playbook, which now has more than 50,000 freelance designers and creative agency customers worldwide.

"Traditional cloud storage companies failed brand design teams and freelancers—sharing is confusing and people get lost in nested folders. In my previous jobs, designers were quitting because file management was giving them so much anxiety," said Jessica Ko, co-founder and CEO of Playbook. "We spent a lot of money on photo shoots because we couldn't find things in Dropbox or Google Drive, or we would have to recreate designs from scratch."

Playbook is an easy-to-use cloud storage and sharing platform for freelancers and designers. It applies modern technologies like image tagging to photos and videos, turning a usually dry view of files into an expressive Pinterest-like gallery. It also adds a suite of features built just for designers, focusing on collaboration and quick sharing. Built-in publishing tools let users turn a set of assets into a live shared page with a variety of templates. Playbook searches across image contents, extracted text, and similar images using its custom machine learning system.

"Solving the pain of organizing and collaborating with design files is just the beginning," said Kevin Zhang, Partner at BCV. "In this unique moment as new perspectives and imagination are more valuable than ever, Playbook is becoming the home for illustrations, videos, memes, and more, and will help creatives to license, publish, transact, and otherwise realize the value of their work."

Since coming out of stealth in August 2021, Playbook has seen monthly users jump from 1,000 early adopters to 50,000+ in just a few months. Brand design teams at companies such as Literati, Opendoor, and Folx, as well as creative agencies around the world, are using Playbook to easily and securely share approved design files across departments and with their clients.

Playbook's mission is to help creators realize the value of their work. The company will use the new funding to iterate and deliver the best file management experience to millions more designers worldwide. Every user starts with a generous free plan. Freelance and in-house designers, through the Artist and Designer program, get 4TB free storage forever as Playbook believes creativity should never be limited by storage size.

About Playbook
Playbook is the first visual cloud storage platform built for creatives. Playbook applies modern technologies like image tagging to photos and videos, being able to view files like Pinterest, inviting collaborators at any point of their creative process, with a variety of templates and creative tools. Playbook redesigned cloud storage to fit exactly what fast-growing design teams and freelancers need. The company has raised a total of $22 million from leading venture capital firms such as Bain Capital Ventures, Founders Fund, Abstract, Maple, Hyphen, and Blank Ventures.

About Bain Capital Ventures
Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. BCV invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from SaaS, infrastructure software, and security to fintech, commerce, and consumer tech. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 395 companies, including Attentive, Digital Currency Group, DocuSign, Flywire, Jet.com, LinkedIn, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, SendGrid, and SurveyMonkey. BCV has $10 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Palo Alto. Follow BCV via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Media Contact

Jessica Ko, Playbook Digital Inc, 1 6508250088, jessica@playbook.com

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SOURCE Playbook Digital Inc