Suite Studios has closed its seed round after raising $3.5m of investment.
The seed round was led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from Range Ventures and other angel investors. The cloud-based post-production company was launched in February 2022 and has experienced a 60 percent growth in revenue month over month.
Post-production is extremely hardware intensive and requires massive amounts of data. Up till recently, this was mostly stored on-premise. A new solution became necessary, however, during the Covid-19 pandemic when many needed to work remotely.
"The traditional post-production process is incredibly time-consuming and costly for creatives and teams," said Craig Hering, CEO and co-founder of Suite Studios.
"As a former creative director, I've experienced the pains of shipping external hard drives, managing cumbersome and expensive on-prem hardware and servers, and traveling to the office for last-minute edits first-hand. I knew I had a solution that could help creatives do better work without all the headaches. We created Suite Studios to help creatives streamline their production workflows and get the most out of the design tools they know and love."
The Suite Studios platform is based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and, according to the company, creative teams can transition from fully on-prem to 100 percent cloud-based using the service in three months. With an increased need for powerful hardware which can have big upfront costs, this could enable the smaller post-production companies to remain competitive.
"We look to back companies with innovative solutions to solve big customer pain points, and Suite Studios' growth in just a matter of months speaks for itself," said Brett Queener, managing director at Bonfire Ventures.
"For far too long, post-production agencies' growth has been limited by their ability to fund large up-front investments in computing power and ensure they have corresponding customer demand to offset them. With Suite, the answer is, indeed, no more. Every post-production agency can now focus on and compete for any work, anywhere and get back to focusing all their time on being amazing creators."
It is not only smaller post-production companies that might turn to the cloud. In December 2022, DCD reported that visual effects company Wētā had stepped out of its comfort zone and rendered Avatar: The Way of Water entirely on AWS. According to the company, the project quite literally outgrew its own data center. Wētā first signed a contract with AWS in 2020 when the pandemic forced employees to work remotely.