[Corrected 11/4/14, 8:45 am. See below.] Nitro Software, a San Francisco-based startup competitor to digital media giant Adobe (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ADBE]]), has raised $15 million from Battery Ventures to expand the market for its document creation and sharing products. [The term “PDF” has been omitted from the lead sentence in an earlier version of this story. Although Nitro’s software is used to create PDF documents, its Nitro Cloud product can be used to share documents in PDF and all other formats. We regret the error.]
Nitro, founded in Melbourne, Australia in 2005, has been challenging Adobe’s Acrobat with its product Nitro Pro, a desktop platform for creating PDF documents that can be shared with business partners and employees to speed up work flows. Nitro’s newer product, Nitro Cloud, allows collaborators working on the same report or contract to use mobile devices as well as desktop computers.
The idea behind Nitro’s “Smart Documents” suite is to eliminate time-consuming steps like printing, faxing, and delivering paper documents as companies work on tasks such as getting a contract finalized and signed, or sealing a deal with a new hire.
“For sharing, collaborating, and signing, we have a unique offering with powerful features to help companies work smarter; and you can get all these features from one Nitro solution, rather than multiple vendors,” Nitro CEO Sam Chandler (pictured above) said in an e-mail to Xconomy. “We are proud to have what we believe are the easiest to use and easiest to deploy products in the market today.”
Users of Nitro’s products can collaborate with users of Adobe’s software, and vice versa, Chandler says.
Nitro says it has 490,000 customers in almost 200 countries, and a staff that has grown to 150 at its San Francisco headquarters and four other locations. Counting the new money from Battery Ventures, Nitro has raised a total of $21.6 million. Australia’s Starfish Ventures was the company’s first venture backer.
Battery Ventures, which operates offices in Boston and Menlo Park, CA, has made other investments in San Jose-based Adobe’s territory. It was the lead investor in Paris-based marketing software company Neolane, which Adobe acquired in 2013 for $600 million. Battery also led a $13.5 million round for sales software startup Yesware in 2013.
