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Tl;dr: We’ve raised a Series D round, led by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), to accelerate our vision for all-in-one docs. Learn more at our second-ever Block Party this fall.
In 2020, we raised a Series C round, doubled our headcount to better serve our growing customer base, and leveraged the flexibility of our distributed team. A year that handed remote work the test of a lifetime gave us the opportunity to help businesses of all sizes adapt to unprecedented terrain.
Welcoming Ontario Teachers’ to the Coda investor group.
We weren’t looking to raise another round so soon, but given the pace of our expansion, we were approached by a number of investors who encouraged us to scale even faster. As we continued to improve the foundations of Coda, we caught the attention of a prolific investor — one who had done their homework and recognized the impact we could make with more resources. This round will accelerate our vision to put more power into the hands of our growing community of makers.
The $100 million Series D financing is led by Ontario Teachers’, a $221 billion fund serving 331,000 active and retired teachers, via its Teachers’ Innovation Platform. Teachers’ Innovation Platform has been a sought-after investor in venture capital and growth equity with investments in companies like SpaceX, Tanium, Epic Games, and Verily. They are leading this round, with participation from our existing investors, because they believe that the power and flexibility of Coda can propel the all-in-one doc industry forward, particularly as companies reach for tools that can adapt to hybrid work environments.
“We’re excited by the power and possibilities Coda offers through its all-in-one doc solution, especially at a time when many companies worldwide are looking for new ways to bring teams together.”
— Olivia Steedman, Senior Managing Director, Teachers’ Innovation Platform
We’re ready to kick our expansion into a new gear, and are eager to match the scale of our ambitions with this opportunity-rich moment in time.
What we’re investing in.
Last year, we shipped over 100 product updates. Our focus was on simplifying common scenarios and expanding our third-party ecosystem. We launched forms, attachments, reactions, deeper integrations with tools like Zoom, and the oft-requested dark mode.
With this series D investment, we’re building out an ecosystem that will take Coda from impactful to indelible.
Leveling-up all-in-one docs.
One of the big projects we have undertaken is the next generation of Coda’s core editor. Rebuilding an editor from scratch is a big effort, and we have high expectations for how it will redefine the expectations for all-in-one docs. We’ll have more to say about this as it launches, but I’ll share a few hints at what this new editor will enable.
Imagine a more creative canvas: people are running their public websites, internal wikis, and entire businesses in Coda, and we’re working to up-level the style options and give you more control over how you lay out your content. (Side-by-side, perhaps? 😉 ). Imagine blending structured and unstructured information together: what could you make if all of the canvas features of Coda were available inside tables, and all the rich logic of tables were available over your canvas content? And of course performance: as we keep expanding the boundaries of Coda, makers keep testing the fences and pushing beyond. The new editor gives us a chance to rethink performance and scalability for the next stretch. Just a taste of what we have in mind — stay tuned for more!
Scaling to support the (new) rituals of great teams.
While many things will return to normal, work-as-we-once-knew-it most certainly will not. Teams worldwide are rethinking their rituals, embracing hybrid workforces, and bracing for a changing market. In this moment, an estimated 60% of global companies are developing permanent hybrid workplace models. They’ll experiment with new tech and techniques like Figma’s infinite hearts table, write new playbooks for business like Robinhood’s strategy for eliminating meetings, and restructure their operational systems and save $100k/year like Squared Away,.
As we’ve seen these rituals being crafted and iterated in Coda, we’ve adjusted the product for enabling these patterns with improvements like custom templates and reactions. We’ll continue to staff up customer- and partner-facing roles as well as enterprise deployments to support the tens of thousands of teams who use Coda every day. Join us!
Expanding the Coda ecosystem.
With the launch of Packs and the beta launch of our API two years ago, we took a huge step in getting our docs to integrate seamlessly with the spectrum of apps used by teams far and wide. But to fully realize the potential of Packs, we can’t be the only ones making them.
We’re excited to put the power of building Packs in the hands of the makers themselves, with a focus on making it easy to create new integrations without having to create new environments to host and run code. We look forward to a future where the maker community can bring their own custom building blocks into Coda and keep the definition of “all-in-one” docs forever growing.
But first, let’s come together!
As you can see we have a lot on our minds for this next wave of Coda, and we want to share how the pieces are coming together…together. Back in 2019, before we launched Coda 1.0, we held our first maker conference to celebrate our prolific early adopters and preview unreleased features. We called it “Block Party”. And we’re ready for the next one.
The second-ever Block Party will take place on October 6, 2021, and it will be a virtual event for makers across the globe to share and create as a community. You’ll also hear more about our latest developments and get a peek at what’s in store. Want to get an early slot on the guest list?
