San Francisco-based startup Almanac announced Thursday that it raised $9 million in a seed round led by Floodgate.
The company encourages its users to collaborate on written work via its cloud-based platform for open source documents. According to the company, Almanac features the world’s largest library of customizable documents that include everything from marketing plans and sales templates to legal documents and more. The company’s current list of clients includes well-known industry giants including Stripe, Gitlab, Netflix and Airbnb.
The cloud-based platform, founded in 2019, is similar to Github and Figma, which allow engineers and designers to share information and easily collaborate with one another. Almanac aims to do the same for those who work outside the world of code and UI design.
“If you’re an engineer these days, you include your GitHub profile on almost every application for a new job. But, if you’re a non-engineer ... there’s really no way to show employers what you can actually do,” Adam Nathan, cofounder and CEO of Almanac, told Built In.
Almanac plans on using the newly acquired capital to launch an array of new features this summer. One such feature gives users the ability to simultaneously compare two documents and merge them together in one “tap.” The company also plans on growing its team of general managers and editors in order to expand upon its existing library of working documents.
“Our goal is to really help people focus only on the work — the kind of creative work that they can do, that they wake up to do, that they’re meant to do — rather than trying to focus on the manual plumbing of trying to keep everything organized, which is totally unnecessary in the cloud-based world that we live in,” Nathan said.
The idea for Almanac came directly from Nathan’s years of experience working in the tech industry. Following his work for the Obama administration as part of the White House Business Council, he went on to obtain positions at tech giants including Lyft and Apple. No matter where he worked, he noticed the lack of a cohesive approach when it came to document sharing.
“There’s just a ton of time spent managing information files and folders across different apps and copying and pasting stuff rather than focusing on the creative or intellectual work,” Nathan said.
By enabling people to focus on their work, rather than formatting details or cross-referencing between documents, Nathan hopes users, and the companies they work for, can increase their productivity.
“There’s an interesting kind of content and knowledge angle to our platform,” Nathan said. “It’s not just about technology, it’s about people and the ideas that they bring to the table.”
The company has raised a total of $16 million in venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase. Additional investors General Catalyst, Inspired, Abstract and Shrug also joined the round. Current and former executives of Yelp, Uber, Lyft, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Adobe have also made financial contributions to the company.
