Macro, a startup aimed at improving the productivity of users of digital documents, has raised $9.3 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Craft, BoxGroup and 3kVC.
Macro’s funding round will help the company to continue its mission of enhancing the user experience for those who work with digital documents. With its focus on developing new tools and improving existing ones, the company is well positioned to tap into the growing market for PDF editor software.
The company’s PDF editor, which comes with a free version and additional features that cost $49 per user per month, offers a number of features to enhance the user experience. One of the standout features is the ability to preview cross-references in a document with just a click. The software also has an AI-powered detector that inserts hyperlinks to pages and sections if they are not already present in the document.
Macro CEO, Jesse Beckerman, spoke about the company’s focus and goals, saying, “We’re focused on power users of productivity apps. Finance runs on XLSX. Law runs on DOCX and PDF. Sales, compliance and more run on PDF. Everything runs on email. We’re particularly excited about how we’ve made documents dynamic and interactive (within DOCX and PDF) and next, we’re focused on making external comms more like chat (fun, fast and more informal) while maintaining backwards compatibility with email.”
The PDF format is one of the most popular on the web, and the market for PDF editor software is expected to reach $3.79 billion by 2027, according to Research and Markets. Competitors in the field include PSPDFKit and Nitro, which both offer their own set of document processing features and APIs.
Beckerman highlighted Macro’s enthusiastic early adopters, saying, “We serve several banks and law firms that operate in counter-cyclical industries like restructuring and distressed investing, which is picking up in the current economic climate. Little did we know, our quest to upgrade the PDF experience was only the beginning of a much bigger mission. As we start to serve … organizations, we’re constantly surprised by how many document problems were still left to solve. Managing versions, information chaos and busywork still plague most workstreams — we’re excited to solve these problems for our end users and enterprise clients.”
In the coming year, Macro’s focus will be on developing a word-processing tool, followed by an inter-company communication tool. Beckerman said, “We’re interested in tailor-made solutions for different verticals. We think horizontal tools have a natural scale advantage, but it’s important to understand how different teams will use the software to get different jobs done.”
