Cloud-based platform empowers creatives to streamline post production workflows, collaborate in real-time, and unlock their creative potential

Suite Studios, a cloud-based platform that empowers creative teams to take control of their post-production workflows, announced the close of their $3.5 million seed round led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Range Ventures and other angel investors. Suite Studios’ easy-to-use cloud-based platform replaces on-premise hardware so creatives and creative teams can focus less on managing infrastructure and more on what matters most – making great content. Since Suite Studios was first made available in February 2022, the company has experienced 60 percent revenue growth month over month leading up to the raise.

“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 firsthand. 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.”

Despite the fact that the creative industry is highly collaborative and computer and hardware intensive, it is one of the last industries to transition to the cloud because it runs on massive file sizes. This means that, traditionally, each post production team member needs a local copy of files to work on projects, resulting in costly hardware and data storage and tedious file transfer practices, such as shipping hard drives across state lines to complete projects. This problem compounds quickly and often means that only those who can invest large amounts of capital into hardware win. To make matters worse, demand for UHD video and computer-generated graphics is only increasing, pouring fuel on the roaring “post production workflow” fire.

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Suite Studios’ robust cloud-based platform, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the easiest way for creative teams to transition to a cloud-based workflow in less than a day, with some studios transitioning from 100 percent on-prem to 100 percent cloud-based in just three months. With features like virtual workstations, the ability to share projects in ‘view-only’ or ‘edit’ in real-time with teams and clients, frame-accurate A/V sync, automatic shutdown, and high color accuracy (4:4:4 color), Suite Studios is specifically built with creative teams in mind.

“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 focus all their time on being amazing creators.”

Suite Studios provides the following benefits for heads of post production studios:

• Removes the headaches of managing on-premise hardware, servers, and other infrastructure, so they can focus on content management and finding talent.
• Results in a better understanding of how much projects cost from an equipment and storage perspective, so they can better project costs and align with business objectives.
• Eliminates the need for a team to work on-site, opening up the opportunity for a distributed workforce so studios can recruit the best and brightest talent.

Suite Studios provides the following benefits for creative teams:

• Increases power of real-time collaboration by allowing creatives to easily join sessions with their team on design tools they have already invested in.
• Improves overall work quality by reducing downtime and increasing productivity.
• Provides a collaborative day-to-day experience similar to a pre-pandemic work environment, without the need for creatives to be physically tied to their desktop.
• Allows creatives to compete based on their actual work product versus what kinds of equipment they are able to afford.

“Suite Studios has transformed the way our teams manage their workflows so we can do our best work,” said Dan Tundis, EP, Director of Post-Production at Hometeam, which is using Suite Studios to run its post-production process. “By helping us easily move to the cloud and taking off the weight of managing tech infrastructure, Suite Studios has helped us reduce project turnaround time and get more out of our existing tools, putting us in a better position to hit our business goals.”

The new funding will primarily go toward serving Suite Studio’s growing list of customers and recruiting top talent, particularly to help develop innovative products to satisfy customers’ ongoing needs for streamlined cloud workflows.

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