Less than nine months after closing its initial seed round, Denver-based content creation startup soona is back again with a $3.5 million seed 2 round aimed at fueling its expansion and product development.
The oversubscribed round was led by Starting Line and Matchstick Ventures and will position the startup to expand its studio experience to Austin. The funds from the round will also be used to establish the first soona digital fulfillment studio and launch a new ecommerce app within the Shopify platform.
Co-founder and CEO Liz Giorgi said interest from the company’s past investors were the primary reason for raising this round.
“The biggest thing was interest from investors to help us go faster and take advantage of the market opportunities out there,” she said. “We feel really lucky and humbled that our institutional investors decided to reinvest and help us to take this next step.”
Since launching in spring 2019, the company has already served over 1,200 customers with its $39 photos and $93 video clips.
The company’s approach of offering both in-studio and online virtual shoots allows brands to create custom content in a professional studio in-person or anytime, anywhere from their desk. From there, soona’s professional-quality photo and video is delivered within 24 hours.
This round builds on a string of recent success for soona, as its retail studios in Denver and Minneapolis reached record booking rates in January, the company said. In December 2019, soona was also named to Colorado Inno’s 20 Startups to Watch in 2020 list.
As the company considered options for expansion, Giorgi said soona looked for cities that were already taking advantage of the online virtual shoot option.
"The first thing is where are we seeing customer pickup? The second thing we’re looking at is the growth of direct-to-consumer product companies, as that makes up 60 percent of our customer base," she said.
Austin checked both of those boxes, and soona is set to open its third brick-and-mortar location later this spring.
The company has 17 full-time employees split across Denver and Minneapolis and plans to have 30 employees by the end of this year. Giorgi said the company hasn’t made any firm decisions on a national expansion yet, though soona will look to host a series of pop-ups around the U.S. to further test its model.
“We’re not just a local brand, we’re a national brand,” Giorgi said, pointing to the popularity of soona’s online product.
The round also included the Candor Clause, an open-source legal framework for promoting gender equity in venture capital. Created by Giorgi and soona co-founder CCO Hayley Anderson, it’s the company’s second deal utilizing the clause. Since its creation, the Candor Clause has been used in more than 50 venture deals.
The clause has gained notoriety and national news coverage and, as a result, Giorgi was invited to testify before Congress last week on creating a more equitable solution for women looking to fundraise.
“It was surreal,” she said. “I was asked to testify and look forward to staying in touch to talk about how the Candor Clause could be somehow represented in law to continue to make raising money a more equitable process for women.”
