Milanote bags $780k seed to tool up its ‘Evernote for creatives’

Creative types hunting for program to help seed and spark inspiration don’t usually have to glance way too considerably. There are a reasonable few options to play with — whether or not it’s a mainstream visual sharing platform like Pinterest or a style-focused moodboard-maker like Niice. But just as writers have a range of workspace tastes, the needs of visual creatives are hardly uniform. So the Australian startup guiding Milanote reckons there’s space for a different approach here.

Milanote’s platform feels element Evernote, element Pinterest — without a doubt, it describes itself as an “Evernote for creatives” — specified it’s presenting users digital spaces (“boards”) paired with a drag and drop interface that can be employed to increase and place photographs and notes to create visual moodboards or display a grouping of thoughts. Its boards are also designed for storing (and/or linking) to associated assets — nesting assets within just new boards acting like folders.

Boards can also be shared so groups can collaborate and view updates across a undertaking. And Milanote involves a to-do list characteristic. So, all in all, the platform feels like more of a multipurpose device than purely a place for designers to play with visuals (however of class you can do that way too). But you could also use it to organize and preserve on major of study, say, or to generate a additional visual checklist or chronicle of an party.

The platform actually started as an internal device for the founders’ other organization (a UX agency) but they made the decision to spin it out — launching Milanote in February, and garnering some 35,000 users thus considerably, according to CEO Ollie Campbell. At this stage he claims the device is being employed by “designers, writers, entrepreneurs and other artistic professionals” — doing work at companies this kind of as Facebook, Apple, Uber, Dropbox, Google, Adobe, Sony and Nike.

The team has just shut a $780,000 seed spherical, led by Simon Martin, the former CFO of MYOB. This will be spent on expanding Milanote’s feature set to assistance what Campbell dubs “key artistic tasks [this kind of as] gathering inspiration from all over the web” (for that it has a “Pinterest type website clipper” in the functions), as effectively as on assistance for video embedding and for additional file types.

They are also arranging to fortify the collaboration functions — including by including the capacity for consumers to get feedback from consumers, and to remark on updates.

“Milanote is a pretty ‘horizontal” device (like Trello/Evernote and so forth) so we have consumers from all various industries and roles. Construction staff, poets, artists, authors, recreation designers, you title it. We have consumers who are writing novels, arranging sermons and organising artwork exhibitions. But our main concentrate on viewers is what we call ‘visual artistic professionals’,” he claims when requested who the main person is.

“Creativity is all about synthesising and combining various items of facts into a little something new. The problem tons of people today experience is that their artistic get the job done is distribute across various tools and platforms — illustrations or photos in Pinterest, notes in Evernote, jobs in Trello, documents in Dropbox, messages in Slack. This fragmentation tends to make it extremely hard to see the total image, which tends to make it tougher to figure things out,” Campbell adds.

“The crucial advantage of Milanote is getting all of your artistic get the job done in one place. This lets you see connections concerning various items of facts and result in new thoughts.”

Milanote is a freemium SaaS, so there’s a absolutely free model with a cap on the range of notes, illustrations or photos or one-way links that can be additional to boards, with unlimited storage unlocked at a value — pricing getting dependent on whether or not it’s a sole person or a team.

The core push to get visual creatives centralizing additional of their undertaking work within Milanote’s nested board structure does of class amp up the prospective storage necessities which plays into its pricing framework. However it remains to be viewed how a great deal need there is from visual creatives to do additional of their “communicating spatially”, as the team places it, vs working with a collection of digital tools at different details of their artistic workflow approach — be it Slack for comms, Dropbox for internet hosting (and sharing) documents, Pinterest for making and sharing moodboards, Google Docs for collaborating and so on.

As with any career part that includes participating in all over with thoughts, it’s probable to be a scenario of ‘horses for courses’. But Milanote reckons its platform can at minimum be a contender in the race to gobble up creatives’ dollars.