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Stop ‘Reinventing The Wheel’: Almanac Creates Open-Source Templates Library With $9M Seed Round

Almanac, a cloud-based platform for professionals to create, collaborate and share open-source work documents, announced a $9 million seed round of funding on Thursday led by Mike Maples Jr., a Floodgate partner.

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“Open source communities revolutionized code, then design. Why not anyone with a keyboard? Almanac is defining the future of how we’ll all work. They’re the first to use the cloud to create a completely social work experience for the masses,” Maples said in a written statement. “Almanac’s platform makes it possible for everyone to do the work they care about, without wasting time on the stuff they don’t. This is an investment in productivity for all.”

The investment also includes nearly 100 investors, from venture capital firms such as General Catalyst, Inspired and Abstract, and current and former executives of some of the world’s most successful companies, Adam Nathan, Almanac’s co-founder and CEO told Crunchbase News.

Founded in early 2019, the San Francisco-based company touts the world’s largest library of customizable business documents and standard operating procedures—10,000 documents so far, e.g. marketing plans, human resources documents and legal templates, that have been published and honed by experts, he said.

“We make teams more productive by removing the tedious work that goes into reinventing the wheel,” Nathan said. “People do repeatable tasks such as recruiting, sales and marketing, so we let employees focus on the parts of their jobs that are unique rather than those that have already been solved.”

He likens Almanac to GitHub for software developers, Figma for designers, and Google Docs. Users can find common templates that can be copied and customized–such as checklists and sales email scripts and process guides–but cloud-based and with a social collaboration where documents can be reused and versioned.

By having a rough draft or head start on a process, Almanac can cut down the amount of work on a process by about half, Nathan said. Plus, documents show who published them and how many times it was copied. The more people using a document shows the quality of it, he added.

In addition, providing an open-source platform helps disseminate knowledge around the world, not just to those who are fortunate to live in a certain location, Nathan said.

Almanac is free to use for companies with up to 50 people, he said, adding that the company charges a subscription fee for larger enterprise teams.

The $9 million seed round will help the company build a new cloud operating system for the 21st century and design a utility tool for any company wishing to transition to a digital business, Nathan said. It will also help users stay organized and collaborate on the documents they use.

Meanwhile, Nathan said Almanac is on track to get millions of users over the next year.

“It’s an investment in democratizing access to basic digital business knowledge,” he said.

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias

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