Company: Powtoon
Founder(s): Ilya Spitalnik and Daniel Zaturansky
Website: https://www.powtoon.com/
Description: Powtoon is the visual communication platform that gives you the freedom to create professional and fully customized videos your audience will love.
Powtoon was created in 2012 by 4 friends. Putting their heads together in a cafe, they wanted to find a way to communicate clearly and engage their audience. Their solution was a cost-effective tool to create engaging and impactful animated videos, avoiding the rocket-high costs of working with an animation studio. Subsequently, they created Powtoon, now the leading global animation software. The name combines “powerpoint” and “cartoon”.
The company was officially founded in January 2012 after a $180K seed round investment in late 2011. They secured further funding in December 2012 from a venture capital firm in Los Angeles, Startup Minds.
Aiming to make animation accessible to anyone, they strive to be the most intuitive and user-friendly animation software on the market. This means that even those with the most limited skill can make engaging, impactful and professional animated videos.
Their overall goal is to “bring a touch of awesomeness to everyday communications”, regardless of the scale of what you are presenting.
The philosophy is inspired by nostalgia: from childhood, animation is deeply impactful, able to evoke all kinds of emotions in their audience. So why do we abandon this method as we enter adulthood? Picture and animation can make a huge impact on their audiences, from anything from education resources to the corporate world.
One of the key selling points of Powtoon is their user experience. With their specially designed tools, including a storyboard builder, ready-made templates and intuitive drag-and-drop features, you can create professional videos in just 20 minutes. They provide additional support through tutorials, webinars and a specialist training centre.
In less than 10 years since their initiation, Powtoon now boasts over 30 million users worldwide with a new Powtoon created every second of every day. They are continuing to grow with 20,000 new Powtoon user signups daily and over 85 million Powtoons having been created and shared globally!
Up until now, they have received about $780K in funding.
