Koral

Founded: 2006

Sector: Office 2.0, Content Management

Headquarters: San Mateo, CA

Management: Mark Suster – Chief Executive Officer, Tim Barker – Vice President of Products, Ryan Lissack – Chief Architect

Funding: Series A

Secret Sauce:
Experience and patience can yield an interesting edge in an Enterprise/SMB market loaded with similar products. Content management, as unsexy as it, is a corporate necessity; jockeying for customers to commit to pricey monthly fees is the name of the game. But first-to-markets come with missing features and bugs (example: the 1st gen. IPhone battery only has 5 hours of talk time). Koral’s spin on their late in the game (01/17/07) free-until-you-grow release is that they’re better able to answer to the wants and needs of users unsatisfied with whatever CM they’re stuck with now. In short, Koral has set its sights on the malcontents.

So are they interested? Well… enterprise clients may still be looking for more corporate-style products (Koral has no file structure and uses tags to label everything) but the small licensing fees may give it some play as groupware within a larger company. It’s a growth market so SMBs, start-ups and mid-to-late adopters could also buy in – this Web 2.0/SaaS thing is still pretty nouvelle to the general public. The interface IS really easy to use and master, it took me a minute from login to upload to seeing a nifty ajax preview of my doc in the workgroup, tagged and ready to be searched. Koral’s version of version-control is user friendly as well. It would be even more useful if you could actually edit online instead of looping through the download-edit-upload cycle, but that’s a limitation shared by most CMs (and maybe a reason why so many of them go unused). Still, there’s a lot of room out there in the market, with a flexible business approach Koral could capture a good enough chunk to actually make some noise.

Seen and Heard: IT|Redux reports: “I got my epiphany for this online service when I saw Mark Suster’s demonstration at the Office 2.0 Conference. In order to upload a document into the system, all you have to do is drag its file onto a drop-box that looks like a folder on your desktop. Scoble says: “Koral has a knowledge management system that is the coolest thing I saw at the SAP show recently.”