Tech fundings are generally considered to be pretty rad, but one of LA’s most recent funding announcements can only be described as “gnarly.”
GNARBOX, a Santa Monica-based startup that develops a device that allows digital content creators to back up, edit and share their media from anywhere, revealed today it had raised $8.5 million in the wake of the startup’s long-awaited device landing on shelves. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate research and development projects and grow the company’s roster.
“We founded Gnarbox as a way to make it easier to create for everybody who owns a camera,” said Tim Feess, co-founder and CEO of GNARBOX. “Everybody who shoots, whether it's a GoPro, a drone or a nice DSLR camera, knows how much storage their content takes up and how long it takes to edit. We want people to be able to meaningfully edit and share it, no matter where they are.”
The funding falls in line with the seed fundings the startup received previously from an undisclosed business as GNARBOX hit its designated milestones, but that doesn’t mean its journey was without potholes.
Originally founded as a software company by Feess and his co-founder Will Africano to help streamline uploading of their GoPro videos, the duo soon discovered the pain point they should really address was getting the content from the device to the internet. Though Feess and Africano had no tech experience to speak of, they were able to learn enough on their own to hack together the earliest GNARBOX prototype and its software component.
“Our first prototype was built on something called a BeagleBone. It was an ugly thing, with all these wires and dongles attached, but we were able to plug a GoPro in and move the files off of it and play them,” Feess said. “Over the next year, we went back and forth between iterating the device and the software when we encountered limitations on one or the other.”
The team was able to raise an additional $500,000 via a Kickstarter campaign, but issues with the manufacturing partner stalled the startup’s plans to begin production on the product.
“We had a lot of trouble in terms of getting an actual product to market the first time we gave it a shot,” Feess said. “We learned a lot of hard lessons from that, but we were able to use everything we learned to make the product even better. We redesigned the whole thing from the bottom up; we chose a new processor and rebuilt the entire platform, and it came out really, really well.”
A seed round of funding secured toward the end of 2016 positioned the company to begin shipping the device in mid-2017, and at the end of May, GNARBOXES hit the market to rave reviews.
Even with the successful product launch and the big Series A, Feess knows there’s a lot of work to be done.
“Overall, it's the coolest thing ever,” he said. “But at the same time, there's never been this tangible moment where we think, 'Oh, we've made it.' It’s such an ongoing process. But it's really good to be in the place we are in. I'm just really grateful to be able to do what I'm doing.
Images via GNARBOX.
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