Flashback about 12 months to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in the U.S.
Denver-based creative content startup Soona was coming off a seed fundraising round and preparing to launch an Austin-based studio during SXSW 2020.
With so much in flux and SXSW’s cancellation, the company delayed that launch and co-founder and CEO Liz Giorgi tweeted at the time, “Welcome to our personal startup hell."
The company was also forced to pivot its business, shifting away from in-studio shoots to a virtual content creation platform.
That decision payed off, as Soona experienced 400% revenue growth during 2020 and is back for additional fundraising with stable footing and extreme confidence for the future.
Today, Soona announced that it raised $10.2 million in Series A funding, led by Union Square Ventures, with follow-on investments from Matchstick Ventures, Starting Line Ventures, 2048 Ventures and Range Ventures.
The round comes as Giorgi said Soona has found a fit in the market and is ready to rapidly scale its team and solution.
“We really have a ton of confidence that we’ve struck a chord on a massive need in ecommerce,” she said. “I think the trends we saw last year is creating this incredible wave for a new need for tools and online experiences.”
The company’s platform provides professional, affordable custom content with a 24-hour delivery time. Customers ship their products and join a shoot online in real-time, where they can give feedback to the crew like they would on an in-person shoot.
From there, companies are taken to an a-la carte menu that sells photos for $39 and video clips for $93.
The success of 2020 has continued into the new year for Soona, as Giorgi said the company had a record sales month last month and now has over 4,000 customers. With a huge increase in online shopping in 2020, Giorgi said the opportunity is now for Soona.
“We see that there are these essential businesses that emerged to enable ecommerce at their best state,” Giorgi said, pointing at brands like Shopify. “We believe that there will be a brand that owns the visual commerce economy and we believe Soona can be that business.”
With this funding onboard, Soona is set to double its headcount from 50 to 100 by the end of the year, with most of those hires focused on the company’s engineering team. It will also be used to help on the operations and logistics front, as Soona manages a business that requires customers to ship them products from around the world.
As it has in previous fundraising rounds, Soona included the Candor Clause, an open-source legal framework for promoting gender equity in venture capital, in this raise. Created by Giorgi and Soona co-founder and chief creative officer Hayley Anderson, it’s the company’s third deal utilizing the clause.
Unlike previous iterations, Soona has expanded the clause to include additional protections.
“The Candor Clause will be releasing a new open-source version that will now include both issues of protecting founders who may have experienced racial discrimination as well as LGBTQ issues and issues of ableism,” Giorgi said.
When asked if she could’ve predicted that the year would play out like it did for her business, Giorgi initially laughed. Then, she doubled down on her confidence in Soona’s business and its leadership team.
“To be totally honest, I have so much confidence in my leadership team,” she said. “You gain the communication skills and the resiliency skills to have brutal conversations and to make hard decisions and make them quickly.”
