Israeli online presentation platform emaze announced it closed a $2 million Series A round of funding led by FirstTime Venture Capital. This brings the company’s overall funding, including a seed round of $800, 000, to a collective $2.8 million.
The company, which hopes to compete head to head with Microsoft’s Power Point program, said that it will use the infusion of new capital to expand its workforce, infrastructure and to provide new designs.
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Emaze describes itself as, “the powerful and dynamic online presentation tool”, boasting that it allows anyone to effortlessly create stunning presentations. With emaze’s cloud-based technology, users can create, edit and playback presentations from any device, wherever they are. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, the company was founded by Motti Nisani, Shai Schwartz and Dr. Arie Livshin.
It offers users more than 80 professionally designed templates including features such as 3D, panning and zooming movement, animation, automatic translation and sound effects. There is also video integration and playback from within the presentation, live data such as a Twitter feed, Survey Monkey results, NASDAQ Ticker and Google Maps.
Emaze also provides shareability via a link. Users click on the “share” button to generate a link that can be used to access, edit or demo the presentation from anywhere, anytime. It also provides easy collaboration for multiple users (options to enable permissions to view, edit) and is built entirely on HTML5 providing full capabilities on any screen.
“I am thrilled to continue to innovate and provide emaze users with fresh and exciting designs that are easily accessible and have a direct impact on their business, ” said Motti Nisani, Co-founder and CEO of emaze. “This investment will also allow us to accelerate global marketing efforts and bring awareness for emaze to our vastly growing markets in education and small businesses. My goal is to help build emaze into the most advanced presentation tool on the market.”
But it remains to be seen if there is any need for the company’s services in the market place. Power Point comes bundled together with all the other MS Office programs such as Word and Excel. There are also the free Google Docs programs.
Even if emaze succeeds at innovating new features that become a must have for people who make such presentations, Microsoft has shown that it can easily copy any such innovations and quickly incorporate them into its software.
