Sydney, Australia, 21 May 2015 – Qwilr, an Australian startup that is re-imagining documents for the 21st century by turning them into beautiful webpages, has today closed its seed funding round raising $500,000 from the likes of Sydney Seed Fund and Macdoch Ventures, among others.
Qwilr transforms static and outdated documents, changing them into beautiful web pages that are intelligent, data rich, interactive and bursting with media. If Squarespace and Medium had a baby, it might look something like Qwilr.
Thousands of freelancers and companies around the world are using Qwilr to replace ugly, archaic documents with stunning pages for new business proposals, resumes, quotes, and even wedding invitations. A beautiful Qwilr page can be made with no design experience in just minutes: http://qwilr.com/yq9SVmmaSkq8
Qwilr was hatched from co-founder Dylan Baskind’s frustration with the inefficiencies that plagued the document and web development tools he used while freelancing as an artist, designer and engineer. His concept for Qwilr was to develop a unified and automated way to produce documents that would present online as impressive, self-hosted websites.
Baskind joined forces with co-founder Mark Tanner, who moved back to Sydney from a senior post at Google New York to help build and scale Qwilr.
Static document creation, despite moving to the cloud, has not had a fundamental shift since the 1980s. Qwilr completely reinvents how we create, design, share, view, track and learn from true web enabled documents.
Tanner said the seed funding round will help make Qwilr a global success.
“We’ve been working hard since 2013 to develop the Qwilr platform in a way that makes it versatile, and beautiful, while incredibly easy to use.
“We’ve just released it to the world, and we’re thrilled at the reception it is getting. The product is sticky, and users are loving it. This funding will help us continue to build new features, and get the product in front of millions of users around the world.
“While we initially saw Qwilr as a way for freelancers and agencies across many industries to submit better proposals, we’re now seeing it used in a much wider variety of fun and practical ways.
“Importantly though, putting new business proposals and quotes in Qwilr is drastically increasing the rate at which our users win clients. Often a freelancer or agency will spend hours and hours on a proposal, only to dump it into a text-heavy, long, ugly document. With Qwilr, that same proposal can look stunning, be done dramatically faster and include all kinds of imagery including pictures, photos, gifs and videos. In addition Qwilr pages have analytics running in the background so you can track how many times your proposal was opened (if at all!) and which sections your clients cared about most.”
“Some supposed innovation out there is not much more than a shareable A4 document. The future of content is in web pages. Not as things we print out and put in landfill, but as beautiful pages we view on smartphones, tablets and desktops.”
About Qwilr
For client facing teams that value efficiency and design, Qwilr creates beautiful webpages with all the functionality of documents. With many tools for creating documents online, and plenty for building websites, only Qwilr combines the best of both worlds. Qwilr Pages are easy to create, easy to reuse, smart and always beautiful.
