Rouen-based startup Bunkr has raised €1 Million from IDInvest (led by Matthieu Baret), Daniel Mahrely & Xavier Niel for their collaborative online presentation tool. The company, whose launch we first covered in May 2013, has seen amazing traction in the last 12 months, growing in the first few months to over 35,000 users, thanks largely to their launch and branding as a “Powerpoint Killer” coinciding with Microsoft co-founder & CEO Steve Ballmer’s resignation announcement last year.
Founded by Alexis Jamet, Edouard Petit & Jean-Christophe Fossati in September 2012, Bunkr’s goal has been to make presentation-making simple, leveraging cloud storage services like Dropbox & Evernote to recycle and store interesting media, as well as making it easy to share & sync presentations across multiple screens.
Insofar as the product is concerned, I would say that I hope that much of the fundraising will go to polishing up the product. The startup is going up against Powerpoint, a product so ingrained in the professional world that to know how to use it well is considered a skill on your resumé. For now, Bunkr lacks many of the features that power PPT users have come to love, and it lacks the polished interaction that comes with using an offline application, instead of a web browser. While I am confident that Jamet and the other founders have a great vision for Bunkr, I have yet to become the hardcore user I hoped I would when the product launched last year.
For Bunkr users, new features like Twitter integration and a new interface should bode well for adoption and monetization. Bunkr’s freemium model allows users to create an unlimited number of presentations for free (there was previously a pay-wall after 2 presentations), and provides a $5/month service to create private presentations, as well as use private templates & Bunkr’s collaborative features.