We’ve covered Seattle-based Haiku Deck‘s iPad-based presentation tool in the past, and come away impressed. The mobile native PowerPoint killer lets anyone create attractive presentations quickly using only their device, and now the startup behind it has raised a $3 million Series A funding round, led by Trilogy Partnership and including existing investors Madrona Venture Group, Founders Co-Op and more.
The $3 million in Series A Funding adds to the just under $1 million Haiku Deck secured in seed funding prior to this, and will help the startup continue to build out its product and expand its user base through additional hiring, Haiku Deck founder and CEO Adam Tratt explained in an interview.
“We’re really excited to be able to grow the team to be able to deliver more to a broader population of people who are using the app,” he said. “As we catch on with more salespeople, and marketing people, social media people and bloggers, there’s just a ton of opportunity for us to build out the platform so we can deliver more awesome things to that audience.”
While the funding means a renewed vigor in product development, Tratt also says they’ll still be sticking to the startup’s core strategy of focusing on simplicity, and delivering tools that are easy for non-designers to use to create excellent-looking presentations. Most recently, the startup added graph and list-making tools to Haiku Deck, both of which you can see in action in the embedded presentation below.
http://www.haikudeck.com/p/WvdAbKOoUd/why-work-at-haiku-deck
Haiku Deck is a perfect example of a classic tool rethought for the mobile-first generation, complete with simple ways built-in to make sharing the presentations it can be used to create easily on the web. Tratt’s small operation has done very well in the eight months or so it’s been on the App Store, and after initial success with the education market, it’s now being picked up by the kind of people who naturally share tools, which bodes well for future adoption.
“What we’re seeing increasingly now that we have charts and graphs and a little more flexibility with the text is more business users and bloggers using the app,” he said. “It’s sort of like a whole new circle in the Venn diagram of awareness for us. Bloggers are increasingly posting Haiku Decks that summarize the story they’re trying to tell in a way that’s very visual and Tweetable. And with salespeople, there are lots of road warriors out there that are going from meeting to meeting trying to customize their pitch.”
While it continues to be free, Haiku Deck is working on premium features to start generating incoming revenue. The current focus is still on user growth, though, according to Tratt, which means we’ll see other updates arrive first.