Heartcore leads $7 million seed round investment in creatives collaboration platform Kive

As a recovering professional photographer, I can personally attest to just how important, needed, and to be frank, necessary what Kive is creating is to not only agencies sourcing collateral, but to the creatives that are creating it.

Using the power of AI to not only accurately tag digital assets (think ease of search), Kive is also matching not just the subject of a creation, but digging into areas such as lighting, moods, faces, emotions, and thousands of other concepts. If you can think it, Kive can find it.

Tapping back to my days of image upon image, the current archive sits at around 16 terabytes, there’s simply no way for one human to match what Kive is doing. And this power isn’t solely for still images, but videos, illustrations, you name it.

The power alone would be enough for me personally to fork over my money, but wait, there’s more …

The organisation and ease of discovery functionality is just a fraction of the equation, as the real juice in the Kive smoothie lies in its creative collaboration facilities. Self-billed as an “intuitive cloud-based visual library built for creatives and creative teams”, Kive allows users (read: both creators and the sourcers of such creativity) to assemble self-organising visual libraries in which added assets are not only automatically tagged as mentioned above, but sorted and categorised. 

Take. My. Money.

“Our mission is to make creative life better, from inspiration to presentation, and the past year has allowed us to prove that we can help creatives be significantly more productive and happier in their work, with an alternative to the fragmented mix of legacy cloud products out there. And with recent advancements in AI, we’ve only just scratched the surface of this ongoing tectonic shift,” commented Kive founder and CEO Olof Lindh.

While I’m not quite sure the tectonic plates are moving due to AI, Lindh certainly is spot on regarding the massive shift in the tech-tonic landscape due to machine learning, which begs the point, when do we drop the artificial and simply refer to it as intelligence?

But I digress.

Kive’s offer is trusted by award-winning creative teams at companies such as heavyweights 72andSunny and B-Reel Films in 70 countries around the globe and has a waitlist currently hovering around 10,000. Yes, that’s right, ten thousand. I’m neither willing to confirm nor deny that yours truly might be amongst the 10k.

In so much, the Heartcore-led $7 million seed round they announced just days ago will be used to fly directly in the face of recent down scale-downs, as the Swedes are aiming to scoop up top-level engineering, product, and design talent. Alongside Heartcore, Creandum and EQT Ventures also participated in the round.

"The creator economy is an important focus for Heartcore, and we think the size of the industry is largely underestimated. Kive is on track to become the ultimate one-stop shop for creative processes, from inspiration through to presentation. We were truly impressed by Olof and his team - they’ve built a product that is deeply user-focused, and the strong engagement metrics are a testament to that,” added Heartcore Capital Partner Levin Bunz.