A little under a year ago, it was clear to us at Avenir that something significant was changing in the creative world. The message came from three different directions at once:
From our consumer portfolio companies, we heard about increased demand on creative teams from the rise of social media algorithms that prioritize content engagement, decreasing the half-life of creative assets. As hyper-focused and personalized content becomes table stakes for brands and algorithms distribute it efficiently, content creation becomes a critical growth engine.
From our AI work, we saw an explosion of generative AI tools that made it easier than ever before for users to create and edit media assets. Increasingly, creativity will extend to everyone and the amount of content will explode. As creatives know all too well, that will raise the bar further for what it gets to get and keep scarce consumer attention.
From our startup interactions, we saw many fast-growing startups address these trends, helping folks analyze, ideate and accelerate their creative processes. Creatives need help to scale into their now-natural role as key drivers of the business- and as that happens, they want to think analytically while preserving the imagination which is at the core of all great work.
Altogether, the world looked like this:
We set out looking for the platform that was best positioned to benefit from these three trends.
That effort led us to Air.
Many reading this will know Air as a digital asset management (DAM) platform that helps companies store and manage the final versions of the image and video files that power their websites, marketing programs and sales initiatives. It IS a damn good DAM- but it is already so much more, extending into desktop workflows (with Airflow), content creation workflows (Dynamic Feedback) and AI-powered search (Smart Search). All of that is just the beginning, and we’re thrilled to partner with Air to envelope that category and build the definitive Creative Operations platform.
I speak for the whole Air team when I say we’re excited to work with our customers and incorporate their feedback into what we’re building (we couldn’t do it without you), but here’s the outline of what we have in mind.
In Air, creatives and others alike will be able to dynamically store, find, iterate upon, analyze and distribute their visual content with AI-infused at every step of the way and seamless integrations into their other tools of record for creation or work management. Much like Gitlab operates across the software development lifecycle, Air will consolidate multiple tools and layers of complexity into a platform that transforms how companies distribute their content.
Need to translate a video into five languages with subtitles?
Want a quick gut-check of how an image will resonate with a specific demographic?
Wish the background of a photo were slightly different?
Trying to tag 20,000 images for dynamic personalization of websites and landing pages?
Hoping to collaborate with your agency partners without emailing files around?
We intend to make each of these (and more) as easy as breathing while still delivering the rock-solid, easy-to-use DAM experience users know and love today. The journey will look something like this (with an even more aggressive roadmap in 2026 and beyond):
We hope that’s a gust of fresh Air against the backs of creatives everywhere.
It’s time for something different, and we look forward to building it with you.
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