The interwebs will give entrepreneurs a lot of advice when it comes to raising money, but much of this literature is written by investors rather than founders, and some popular resources are from a decade ago. My cofounder (Eric Lu) and I raised a $1.7M seed round for our video and image editing company, Kapwing, in 2018, so I have some relatively recent insight into what it’s like to raise an institutional seed round in Silicon Valley. »
In 2017, I left Google to work with a friend and former co-worker on a startup idea. We named the company Hot Barber and bought the domain hotbarber.com. For two and a half months, we worked long hours to get the business off the ground. It didn’t work. Despite our enthusiasm around the product idea, we decided to stop working on Hot Barber and commit our time to something else. »
My cofounder and I both worked at Google for two years as Associate Product Managers. Then, we started a content creation website called Kapwing together. When raising Kapwing’s Series A, I got the opportunity to pitch to Keith Rabios, a GP at Founders Fund. He didn’t invest. I found out later that Rabois had previously tweeted that he almost never invests in Google PM or engineering founders. Rabios pointed out on Twitter that of the 390 unicorns, only one (Wish, led by Peter Szulczewski) had a former Google PM as CEO/founder. »
Heroku recently exposed our private database information because of a serious security vulnerability in their email service. I wanted to share this security hole with other developers and Heroku customers who might be affected. We’ve generally had a great experience with Heroku and have been customers since we started Kapwing. This article is not intended to be a scathing review of Heroku, but I do think that other webmasters should know about this security incident and that Heroku should put out more information publicly to all those who were affected. »
Kapwing’s Studio is a free image, video and GIF editor designed for modern creators. People can do simple tasks quickly and make digital media to share, teach, or entertain others. We started two years ago with the goal of making multimedia storytelling as accessible, simple, and collaborative as other cloud-based software we love. This week, Kapwing launched Collaborative Workspaces, a shared space where creators can work together on video, image, and design projects. »
I’m the cofounder of a startup called Kapwing, a popular website for making videos, images, and GIFs. When we launched two years ago, we added a brand watermark to every clip made on Kapwing. As a result of that watermark, our brand has gone basically as viral as any startup could hope. Clips with the Kapwing watermark have been retweeted by Kanye, shown on TV, featured on r/all, and reached 5M impressions on Facebook …with no marketing spend. »
I’m thrilled to announce today that we’ve partnered up with Saar Gur at CRV to grow Kapwing’s content creation platform. This Series A financing allows us to make Kapwing free to use, to grow our engineering team, and to evolve from a tool to a full multimedia platform for both individuals and teams. We met CRV through Justine and Olivia Moore, two rising investors that I worked with while we were both in college, journalists at The Stanford Daily. »
SAN FRANCISCO, CA. — September 24, 2019 10:00AM PT Kapwing, a free online image and video editing platform, announces an $11M Series A financing round led by CRV. Kapwing strives to empower a rising class of modern creators who need faster, simpler, and more accessible software to make and share digital media. The platform has grown to millions of creators since launching two years ago. Kapwing founders Julia Enthoven and Eric Lu, both former Google Product Managers, were inspired to build a better multimedia creative suite after using today’s leading editors: Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, and iMovie. »
