Founders: Jessica Storry, Ian Parkes, Bartosz Romanowski & Kamila Romanowska
Founding: 2018
Mission: Stockpress is a new kind of file management software specifically built for teams whose work depends on finding and sharing files
Employees: 5 & 20% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $2.5M Raised
Investors: Argon Ventures, Alumni Ventures, deftly.vc, Stage 2 Capital, York IE, Everywhere Ventures, Two Lanterns Ventures
Key Customers: Shutterstock, Georgetown University, Tracktown USA, Compass | Lila Delman, Akumin
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Stockpress is “collaborative file management software” for distributed teams. Their platform helps teams whose work depends on finding and sharing files, by combining the ease of file management with the features of digital asset management. Stockpress makes it easier than ever to find, use, share, and manage any file type.
You might think that the problem has already been solved, but not so fast my friends. Let me explain.
Jessica, Ian, Bartosz & Kamila were living the dream. Four friends running an agency together, aptly named create great things. They helped their customers develop websites, applications, and other custom software to help businesses grow. Over 12 years of operations they would share demos and projects with clients, ringing the cash register. Life was good!
But sometimes it was a little annoying. A client might ask “do you have that illustrator logo file we worked on together from a few years ago?” They were pretty organized but it felt like historical files were difficult to retrieve and it took an unnecessary amount of time to figure out the right organizational storage process.
One of their marquee agency clients, a well-known sports media brand, was looking for more customization across the 1M digital assets they managed. They were using an open-source digital asset management tool to keep their assets organized instead of an enterprise solution. Because those are pretty expensive and didn’t really fit their use case either.
The Stockpress team felt that there must be a way to leverage these two technologies and they decided to build a tool that brought together the features of enterprise DAM that they loved, with the familiar folder structure of Dropbox or GDrive. Their focus was flexibility for the consumer, but with the security and horsepower of an enterprise use case like Adobe’s Experience Manager, but in something that was easy to use, scalable, and affordable. No surprise, their new internal tool worked great, and when they started using it with their agency clients 10+ signed up to be customers. Then they took it back to their sports media client and, upon showing their sports media client the software, were invited to become an approved technology vendor and take over the file management software. A double win!
It turns out that there is a big gap between traditional file management systems and digital asset management systems in price and functionality. Today, you can basically choose between a $10/user solution or a $1,500/user solution (up to $50k per customer) in a $90B market growing to $250B by 2027 (src).
Naturally, the team asked themselves, could we productize and sell this tool externally? They rolled it out to all of their agency customers, ironing out the initial wrinkles, and then proceeded with an external launch. Stockpress was born, bringing in almost 10,000 users into the tool overnight.
Over time they started spending less time on the agency and more time converting clients into Stockpress customers. Eventually, they stopped bringing in new clients altogether. In January of 2022, the Stockpress team raised an initial pre-seed round from Stage 2 Capital and Alumni Ventures to close the agency and focus on building Stockpress 100% of the time.
Their freemium horizontal SaaS offering provides a self-serve platform with unlimited users, 3 GB free, Dropbox/Box/GDrive integrations, and paid plans with enhanced functionality starting at $49/month. They’re combining the best of file management and digital asset management for the benefit of the end user. Like HubSpot – easy to use, easy to buy, and easy to sell.
From a product perspective, there are some important distinctions Stockpress offers relative to the traditional consumer file storage and sharing platforms. Stockpress doesn’t have a traditional folder structure. Their Collections feature allows the same file to live in multiple places so they don’t need to be duplicated each time. When files are imported, they identify duplicates to help save on storage too.
More recently, they’ve been building in AI tagging features to help drive better discovery. Stockpress maps metadata from image files so users can search file contents beyond a filename search. From a file versioning perspective, when you make a change files can be updated to the new version, eliminating confusion.
From a security standpoint, Stockpress provides a better solution than traditional file storage platforms and is more affordable than the large-scale enterprise platforms like Adobe or Bynder. Stockpress is digital asset management coming downstream, simplifying file storage and making it more user-friendly for a mid-market audience.
The team is racing ahead to position itself for continued growth. They want to bring on customers in a more repeatable way against existing strong net customer retention (NRR) and their GTM motion will bind that together. They have 17,000+ users and dozens of paid customers. The next step will be to build credibility with existing customers and become the go-to choice for mid-market digital asset management. They’re working with brands and e-commerce companies as well as creative departments within companies. Sports & media organizations are another interesting use case as those organizations deal with many photography files & other digital assets. The team has seen a 94% increase in total workspace storage year over year.
One of their co-founders is based out of Boston and their first Revenue leader is moving to town too. Just last week they announced their $1.8M Seed fundraise led by Argon Ventures (out of Boston), with participation from York IE, Two Lanterns VC, and The Fund XX/Everywhere Ventures alongside their existing investors Stage 2 Capital, deftly.vc, and Alumni Ventures. They’ll use the proceeds to grow their team, particularly on the GTM front.
Operators to Know:
- Ian Parkes, Founder & CRO
- Jessica Storry, Founder & CEO
- Bartosz Romanowski, Founder & CTO
- Kamila Romanowska, Founder & CCO
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Stockpress team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the key milestones Stockpress is hoping to achieve by the end of 2023?
- What does success look like in 2024 and what is the vision for the company?
- What will be the main use of proceeds from the latest funding round?
- What verticals will be key to help differentiate Stockpress from existing tools in the file storage and DAM space?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Stockpress you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more file management customers into a modern & flexible hybrid asset management platform. All the organized, Type A operators applaud your efforts. See you around town!