Collato announces public launch and investment round

November 2021 is full of news for Collato. After 18 months of work, Collato is announcing a funding round with prominent investors, while making its product available to anyone.

Creative workflow software Collato raises €4.2m Seed funding from prominent investors

New investment from Redalpine, Mangrove Capital and Zalando CEOs to kickstart the public launch of creative management solution Collato.

Berlin, 24.11.2021 - Collato, the SaaS solution to simplify creative workflow management, today announced its Seed funding round of €4.2m, led by Redalpine.

As they publicly launch, the Berlin-based team is looking to double its team size to execute their ambitious growth targets and accelerate platform innovation. Since May 2020, Collato has been developing collaborative software for marketers and creators who are regularly managing content production of videos, designs or texts. It's removing the complexity of going from brief to feedback to file sharing – while working across teams, with decision makers or external partners.

Aligning these parties has become even more difficult: According to Adobe, by 2022, 745 million people worldwide will be creating content or involved in various parts of the production process. On top of that larger number of collaborators, the pandemic had companies introduce remote or hybrid work policies. This forced many teams to rethink their existing creation processes or find new solutions for distributed collaboration.

That’s why, during the past 18 months, the Collato team has worked intensely to provide an innovative answer. After nearly 9 months of testing in a private beta, the platform is now open to the public. The promising first results the test phase has delivered attracted prominent investors. Amongst them Redalpine, the new lead investor, former investor Mangrove Capital Partners, alongside business angels Robert Gentz, founder and Co-CEO of Zalando and Rubin Ritter, Zalando’s former Co-CEO.

"Fresh, creative content is fueling the digital economy and the volume is growing exponentially. Processes are today more collaborative, asynchronous and globally distributed than ever before. Both trends increase the complexity to a point, where they can hardly be handled in traditional ways,” states Sebastian Becker, Partner at Redalpine, “there needs to be an integrated tool, to productively support collaboration along the entire journey of an asset and I believe that Collato can become that place.”

After over 500 user interviews and tests, the team is breaking down all the barriers in the creation journey, redesigning collaboration with a set of innovative features. Users are able to comment on any media file directly, in video messages or with emojis. Projects can be organized with assigned tasks, workflows and Kanban boards. Creative deliverables and all previous versions, are stored in the cloud and remain discoverable with meta-information. External partners get access to selected content with a link that allows them to contribute even without their own customer account.

CEO Ivo Scherkamp has experienced inefficient creation processes first hand: "Good creative content is fundamental to successful sales & marketing and with the majority of spending shifting towards visual formats, there needs to be a better way to provide that content. Alignment often still happens in calls or email threads."
Collato CTO Sebastian Bojahr knows: "Getting this content alignment process right is an important key to success". He and his team of engineers continue to build the future of creative collaboration. ⁣

ABOUT COLLATO
Collato is a collaboration SaaS platform where teams can share, iterate and organize their creative assets – from ad videos, to web designs, to social posts. The solution enables collaborators to submit visual briefs, assign tasks on boards, annotate feedback directly on assets and request sign-offs from decision-makers. Collato was founded in May 2020 and is located in Berlin. There is a team of 16 employees, led by CEO Ivo Scherkamp (Ex-VP Zalando) and CTO Sebastian Bojahr (Ex-CTO Everestate).