Toronto-based Storyflow has raised $500,000 in seed funding led by Ripple Ventures.
Storyflow provides a central hub for building interactive voice entertainment on smart speakers. It helps individuals and organizations create, distribute, and monetize content, allowing creators to publish directly to voice apps on smart speakers, without the need for coding. The funding will be used to hire new talent and scale the platform’s enterprise capabilities.
The platform is made up of a drag-and-drop builder to make content creation more accessible.
“There is a growing number of smart speakers in homes across North America, with the rate of adoption trending higher than that of the mobile phone, targeting 75 percent household penetration within the next two years,” said Braden Ream, co-founder and CEO of Storyflow. “Smart speaker voice entertainment is growing and Storyflow makes it easy for people to find voice entertainment they love, and for creators to quickly build and monetize this content on smart speakers. Think of us like the YouTube for voice entertainment, where the best content is recommended for you, and anyone can create and share this content, without coding.”
Early-stage fund Ripple Ventures announced in early September that it closed $10 million. The fund focuses on early-stage companies in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal, and Boston.
“Ripple Ventures was launched this year with the belief that early-stage investments should be inclusive of ancillary services, beyond a typical capital injection, which is why we are taking an ‘operator first, investor second’ approach to our fund and opening an incubator for our portfolio companies to work from,” said Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner at Ripple Ventures, said at the time.