Key Takeaways
- • Air, a Brooklyn-based startup building a Pinterest-style digital asset manager for communications teams, closed $6 million in funding led by Lerer Hippeau, according to TechCrunch.
- • RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital and WndrCo also participated in the round.
- • Air charges $10 per user per month with 100GB of storage included and lets customers migrate files from Dropbox or Google Drive to its AWS-hosted platform.
- • The company targets brand marketing managers, content coordinators and social media managers, aiming to expand vertically within marketing departments.
- • CEO Shane Hegde positions Air as a workspace collaboration tool rather than simple cloud storage or digital asset management.
Summary
Air, a Brooklyn-based startup, has closed $6 million in funding led by Lerer Hippeau, according to TechCrunch. RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital and WndrCo also participated in the round. The company is building a digital asset manager for communications teams that find general-purpose cloud storage inadequate for handling visual files. According to the company, offerings from Google and Dropbox often handle digital assets poorly, particularly when previewing items, while more focused digital asset management competitors frequently require dedicated administrators inside the organization.
Air's interface displays photos, videos, PDFs, fonts and other visual assets as Pinterest-style boards, with an emphasis on thumbnails and video previews. The platform lets customers migrate files from Dropbox or Google Drive to its AWS-hosted storage. Beyond storage, the company emphasizes collaboration, enabling co-workers to comment on and tag assets. The team has focused on users in brand marketing, content coordination and social media management roles, with the aim of scaling vertically within marketing departments.
Pricing is set at $10 per user per month, including 100GB of storage. The company is positioned to benefit from a trend toward a la carte software spending, where teams adopt products with specific toolsets rather than mandated enterprise suites. Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, told TechCrunch that employees are likely to produce better work when they use tools they choose, contrasting this with Adobe's suite approach. CEO Shane Hegde said Air aims to do for visual work what Airtable and Notion have done for spreadsheets and docs, while stressing that the product differs from cloud storage or digital asset management.
Air's interface displays photos, videos, PDFs, fonts and other visual assets as Pinterest-style boards, with an emphasis on thumbnails and video previews. The platform lets customers migrate files from Dropbox or Google Drive to its AWS-hosted storage. Beyond storage, the company emphasizes collaboration, enabling co-workers to comment on and tag assets. The team has focused on users in brand marketing, content coordination and social media management roles, with the aim of scaling vertically within marketing departments.
Pricing is set at $10 per user per month, including 100GB of storage. The company is positioned to benefit from a trend toward a la carte software spending, where teams adopt products with specific toolsets rather than mandated enterprise suites. Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau, told TechCrunch that employees are likely to produce better work when they use tools they choose, contrasting this with Adobe's suite approach. CEO Shane Hegde said Air aims to do for visual work what Airtable and Notion have done for spreadsheets and docs, while stressing that the product differs from cloud storage or digital asset management.
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