Business Canvas, the South Korean document management SaaS company behind Typed, announced today it has raised a $2.5 million seed round led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment, with participation from Kakao Ventures and Nextrans Inc.
The seed round will be used for accelerating product development and the global launch of an open beta for its AI-powered document management platform. The company opened an office in Santa Clara, California this year to spur its global expansion.
The problem that Business Canvas has identified and is building solutions to target is the challenge faced by people who are tasked with ingesting information and producing writing or decisions based on that: lawyers, entrepreneurs, researchers, students and communications workers like journalists among them. People are bombarded with information these days, thanks to technology. That might be good in some cases, but in the world of work, and specifically written work, there is such a thing as too much information, which can take a lot of time to process, and thus eat into the time we need to produce work based on that information.
Business Canvas, founded in 2020 by CEO Woojin Kim, Brian Shin, Seungmin Lee, Dongjoon Shin and Clint Yoo, is hoping to solve the challenge that every knowledge worker and writer faces: spending more time on research and file organization than the actual content output they need to create.
“In fact, people commit over 30% of their working hours trying to search for that file we once saved in a folder that we just cannot find anymore,” Kim said.
Through a network that intelligently tracks and organizes files based on the user’s interactions, Typed brings together knowledge from different websites and applications into one simple-to-use and quick-to-learn digital workspace.
Strictly keeping its users’ information and their confidential files uninterrupted, Typed does not access the content of users’ documents but utilizes them as machine learning data, Kim told TechCrunch. It collects users’ actions as data points, merging this with publicly available metadata from documents and resources under users’ permission, Kim added.
“Modern document writing has not changed since the 1980s,” Yoo said. “While we have more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before, we use the same rudimentary methods to organize and make sense of it. We want any writer — from lawyers and entrepreneurs to researchers and students — to focus on creating great content instead of wasting time organizing their source material. We achieved this by making knowledge management more like the way our brain operates.”
Since the launch of the closed beta test in February 2021, Typed has seen significant user growth, with 25,000 files uploaded and 350% month-over-month active user growth. It does not disclose active user numbers but said that it currently has more than 10,000 users on the waitlist.
Typed will be available through a freemium model and is currently accepting beta registrations on its website.
“When we tested our closed beta, our metrics showed top traction among students as well as journalists, writers and lawyers, who require heavy research and document work on a frequent basis. We opened up access earlier this month for the waitlists in over 50 countries. These are primarily B2C users,” Kim told TechCrunch. “As for B2B, we are currently in the process of proof-of-concept for one of the largest conglomerates in South Korea. Smaller teams like startups, boutique law, consulting firms, venture capitals and government institutions also have been adopting Typed as well.”
“While the company is still in its nascent stage in its development, Typed has the potential to fundamentally change how we work individually or as a team. If there is a business to take on our outdated way of writing content, it’s them [Typed],” Shina Chung, Kakao Ventures CEO said.
The global market size for social software and collaboration SaaS is estimated at $4.5 billion in 2021, increasing over 17% year on year, Kim said.
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