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Last summer, Templafy received a 20 million DKK investment. The money was going to be used for product integration with the enterprise segment and attract the best talents in the business. Now they have recently entered into a collaboration with Microsoft.
By Christina Klavsen and Tina Søndergaard
The Danish startup Templafy has developed a cloud-based service, which ensures that organisations can maintain a visual and legal standardization in templates, documents and presentations across platforms. Their solution secures constant access to all materials and that the material is always ‘on-brand’.
In short, the software secures an up to date visual and factual identity on all documents across an organisation. This process is otherwise still to a large extent manual even in large enterprises.
Only six months after their latest capital round raising tens of millions of DKK, Templafy has sold 40.000 licenses in four countries and the entrepreneurs have signed a contract with large Danish companies such as ATEA, DSB and Scandinavian Tobacco Group. Now the Templafy team is ready to take on the American market.
In collaboration with Microsoft
As a step in this direction, the startup has entered into a collaboration with the IT-giant Microsoft, which is known for its active engagement and support of startup environments across the globe. From a business perspective this move makes really good sense explains Christian Lund.
“Microsoft offers a market of 600 million enterprise users of Office and an amazing platform to develop and roll out apps that integrate our solution directly in the user’s everyday life. The newest technologies in Office 365 has only made it easier for us to secure a consistent user experience to our customers regardless whether the users work with company documents on-premise, in the cloud or both.”
Microsoft is equally enthusiastic about the collaboration, which recently brought Templafy and Microsoft together at the Microsoft Ignite Event in Chicago.
“Templafys solution is a brilliant example of a solution built on Office 365 as a standard platform. Only few people know that we at Office 365 have a marketplace, where the individual costumer or a partner can make Office 365 Apps for the company specifically or for the gigantic market that Office is, with more than one billion users worldwide. Templafy have seen this opportunity and are building their solution on the office platform and see this as an opportunity going forward with other business-centered apps,” says Aaren Ekelund, Head of Division, Microsoft Office
Focus on the niche ensures a strong global position
The need for visual and legal standardization in organization documents is global. While other players have focused on securing access and user friendliness in their services, Templafy has created a service that also works across applications.
“We help secure that designs and company-specific content, such as contracts and legal documents are always up to date, no matter where or how the user chooses to approach them,” explains Christian Lund who is the CEO of Templafy and has worked with internal standardization of company documents for over ten years.
Even in smaller companies, having to change the company address manually on each individual legal document and stationary is very time consuming. Templafy obliterates this task completely and that is what made the venture companies Sunstone Capital and SEED Capital invest tens of millions in the company.
Even more people will work in the cloud in the future
According to estimates, there are around one billion Office users across the globe. The research institute Gartner expects 60 percent of these to be cloud-based by 2020. This expectation of a general change in behavior is what the Templafy team think will put them in a strong position in the future.
”Our position in the global market can be explained, simply by the service that has its engine in the cloud, so that it works across all programs, regardless of where it is stored,” explains Christian Lund and continues:
“Thereby, we are falling straight into a huge demand from the many companies, which have already put most of their programs in the cloud. Visual and legal compliance in documents may not be the sexiest discipline in the world, but the demand for a solution, that obliterates “document anarchy”, is huge within companies everywhere in the world. We are claiming a market niche, that no one else has claimed yet,” he emphasizes.
Since launching, Templafy has won the ‘Traction Award’ at the DEMO conference in USA and ‘The Battle of the Vikings’-pitch contest at Nordic Startup Conference.
