On EQT Ventures’ investment in Kive, the smart asset platform for creators
Today, Stockholm based Kive announced its Series Seed, co-led by EQT Ventures and Creandum. Kive builds a self-organizing hub for creators to keep and share their creative assets.
Before becoming an investor, I created digital products, entertainment, marketing and brand identities. A big part of the job as a creative professional is synthesising and recycling — “stealing with pride”. No matter what is being created — an app, a dress, a piece of music or a bridge — it’s more or less a remix.
Creatives use these existing things — references — as building blocks when creating, or as a language when collaborating. Most creatives build large reference libraries of things that inspire them over their careers, in more or less structured ways. The creative’s version of the sales person’s Rolodex if you will.
Most creatives’ reference libraries are a mess. They live in a folder system, locally, or some cloud storage. Back when I worked as a Creative Director, I remember searching for a solution, tried out Evernote, and accidentally merged my messy excuse for a reference library with all the old invoices and Excel files of last year’s bookkeeping. Success.
This is what Kive is designed to solve. Designed to be the hub for creative work, it leverages machine learning to automatically categorize and index creative assets. By automatically analyzing and tagging them, it enables creatives to search for faces, emotions, locations, actions, light and/or shot types.
That’s a big deal. It means creatives don’t have to spend time on admin — but can increase the time shaping whatever they are creating instead. And with Kive’s collaborative features, teams can share and access the references that inspire others.
As a creative, this is a massive unlock. Kive becomes the hub for all of the creative work, serving both as a personal library and collaborative workspace. And in an emerging designtech ecosystem, we believe this is one of the most interesting positions to be in.
But the main reason for investing in Kive is Olof himself. He created the product entirely on his own on the side of his work as film director, represented by some of the leading production companies in the world (B-Reel Films & ICONOCLAST). Olof built Kive to make his own creative life easier, and had gotten great early feedback from friends, colleagues and collaborators.
Since I first met Olof over a year ago, I’ve gotten to know a visionary, mission-driven founder that I believe will be an as successful startup founder as he is a film director.
We couldn’t be more excited to work with Olof, his future team (apply here!), and Creandum to support Kive on its journey ahead.
And of course to become power users of the product… to store all of our Excel files. 📊
Shoutouts to Måns Jacobsson Hosk (CEO of brilliant brand agency Kurppa Hosk) who introduced us, and to Joao, Sandra and Naza who worked with me on the deal. Read Creandum’s article here.
