Hedge, the people behind Postlab have today announced a round of funding with some familiar industry advisors joining.
Well to be honest the headline should really have said 'Company raises $3M; acquires Divergent Media assets, invests in Colourlab and establishes world-class advisory team'. A touch long and our server doesn't like the odd semi-colon thrown into a URL.
But a lot going on, so let's break it down point by point.
There is a new $3M round of funding led by ex Final Cut Pro X product manager Steve Bayes. Through that funding, Hedge will acquire Divergent Media assets EditReady & Scopebox.
They are also taking a stake in the artificial intelligence powered colour grading system Colourlab.ai. (Not too sure if we have gained an extra U on the journey there.) You can read Steve Bayes' introduction to Colourlab right here on FCP.co. Hopefully a Final Cut Pro plugin will follow!
“Hedge has had five consecutive years of profitable growth. But, even with our success and rapid development schedule, there’s still so much more we can build to make life even better for our customers,” states Paul Matthijs, co-founder and CEO of Hedge. “With this investment coming from industry leaders who understand the pain points we are trying to solve, we will grow our team and focus on optimizing the workflow for customers rather than finances, bringing new features and entirely new products to market faster. And by investing back into the industry, we are also building a new era of video workflows that are open, reliable, and fast - and that will catapult video production into the modern age.”
Two new advisors are also joining Hedge, both will be familiar to FCP.co readers.
Estelle McGechie is currently serving as the Chief Product Officer at Atomos. She was also the FCP product manager who took over from Steve Bayes when he left Apple.
Robin Moran is a filmmaker, runs a RED camera hire company in Indonesia (Coincidentally, I have one of his company T-shirts on today from IBC 2017) and is a fan of Final Cut Pro. We have seen him present at FCPX Creative Summits and of course has put together some great high-end articles for FCP.co.
Interesting times. We are a big fan of Hedge's Postlab Drive and use it daily. We can see the beginnings of a larger ecosystem starting - Are we going to see another camera-to-cloud workflow?