Kive, a Swedish inspiration management platform built for creatives, has closed $7 million in seed funding. The investment round was led by Heartcore (that backed Podimo and Finn, among others) longside participation from Creandum (that recently backed Timberhub and Klaus) and EQT Ventures, which launched the world’s first-time growth fund at €2.4B. The round also saw participation from angels such as Intercom Co-founder Des Traynor and VEED Co-founder Sabba Keynejad.
The funding comes at a time when the Stockholm-based company has seen a rapid adoption of its platform among early access creatives and creative companies across over 70 countries.
Plans to hire fresh talent
With the new funding, Kive plans to do the opposite of what many others are currently doing. Instead of aggressive scale-downs, the company will bring on board the best engineering, product and design talent to tackle the many exciting challenges of their continued journey.
Olof Lindh, CEO and Founder of Kive said, “With the new funding we’re looking to add the brightest minds in product development to our ambitious team and put even more energy into building the next big global product company out of Stockholm. We are extremely happy to have Heartcore in our corner on the way there, and their leading a $7M seed round in the current market environment is a testament to their huge conviction in the space, vision, product and team”
“The creator economy is an important focus for Heartcore, and we think the size of the industry is largely underestimated. Kive is on track to become the ultimate one-stop shop for creative processes, from inspiration through to presentation. We were truly impressed by Olof and his team – they’ve built a product that is deeply user-focused, and the strong engagement metrics are a testament to that,” added Levin Bunz, Partner at Heartcore Capital
End-to-end platform for creative collaboration
Kive was founded in 2018 by Olof Lindh in Stockholm with the mission to make creative life better, from inspiration to presentation. It is an intuitive cloud-based visual library built for creatives and creative teams. Through the application of AI and machine learning technology, Kive allows users to build beautiful self-organising visual libraries in which added assets are automatically tagged, sorted and categorised.
Users can search across objects, light types, colors, faces, emotions and thousands of other concepts. Custom features also allow users to extract references from any video, present interactive moodboards and discover inspiration from other creatives.
Current, the fast-growing inspiration management platform has over 10,000 creatives on the waiting.