Aviary
Today we announced Spark’s investment in Aviary (www.aviary.com) – a pioneering suite of digital creation and editing tools in the cloud. With this investment, we join a terrific team of existing investors including Bezos Expeditions and a prominent network of angel investors who continue to be engaged in the business.
Aviary’s business is exciting on two primary fronts. Firstly, Aviary is fundamentally democratizing digital creation by bringing free browser-based tools to a previously desktop software dominated market. The software as a service model has been proven over and over again in multiple markets (Salesforce, NetSuite, Google Docs, Flickr, Vimeo, DropBox, etc.) and it is sure to extend to the creative marketplace. And the Freemium business model is continuing to prove itself across a number of these businesses as well as many others.
We are also in the very early stages of an emerging digital economy. I’ve said before that I expect the digital goods market to grow substantially over the coming years and mirror the market for offline goods in many ways. We recently reached the $1B threshold of digital goods sold, and it’s still incredibly early. Aviary provides the manufacturing capacity for this digital economy. Their toolset and open API empower the market for creation, allowing users to participate in the creation as well as consumption of digital goods. This completes the circle necessary to exponentially increase the number of creators and collaborators contributing to the digital goods marketplace and ultimately drive the velocity of the digital economy.
What I’m most excited about though is having the opportunity to work with Avi, Michael, Iz and the rest of the terrific Aviary team. The products they’ve built to date are nothing short of fantastic. And they’re just getting started…
There’s No Time Like The Present
Today the Spark Capital team announces a new seed program, Start@Spark.
Having helped incubate a number of start-ups in the past, I am personally very excited for this new initiative. There is no greater challenge or bigger thrill than trying to build something from nothing. We at Spark look forward to supporting entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of ideation and innovation.
It is also fundamentally important that we do our part to help bring this great country out of its current financial and economic malaise. It is our time to rebuild. And hopefully Start@Spark can do its small part to contribute to that rebuilding.
As Santo said eloquently in his post this am:
So, this must be a terrible time to fund a start-up company. Correct? Au contraire. This may be the best time in the last 8 years to start a company. While capital is scarce, the tectonic plates continue to shift creating major rifts. The walls are coming down and the barriers to entering new markets are falling along-side.
Looking forward to hearing your ideas!
