Built In Chicago and Marengo Hampshire Partners would like to congratulate April’s Startup of the Month: Branchfire! This software company makes iAnnotate, an iPad and Android tablet app that lets you take notes right on PDFs.
Founded in 2011, Branchfire has reached profitability without any outside funding and now has 21 employees. Its three cofounders, Ravi Bhatt, Jim Brink and Stephen Hockema each hold degrees in computer science and cognitive science from Indiana University, where they first met. Bhatt and Brink studied these fields as undergraduates, while Hockema took them on at the Ph.D. level.
The combined ability to develop software and understand people eventually led the three to unite, years down the line. Brink teamed up with Hockema to venture into mobile apps, and the two drew on their education and work experience to come up with some preliminary iOS apps. After some time, Bhatt came on board and Branchfire was born. The three of them pooled together to create an app that would give users the ability to not only read but also markup PDFs on mobile devices.
Today, iAnnotate boasts over 800,000 paying users, more than 200 enterprise clients and about 100 SDK licensees worldwide, half of whom generate revenue for Branchfire through use of their technology. Some of their most interesting customers are students at top universities such as Harvard and Northwestern, and the casts of Modern Family and The Walking Dead. On top of that, iAnnotate users have viewed over 75 million documents through the app, adding over 500 million markups per year. That equates to over 10 billion pages viewed through the app, an amount that would require an estimated 1 million trees worth of printed paper.
We caught up with Bhatt, Branchfire’s CEO, to find out more about his company’s challenges and successes.
How did the idea for Branchfire come about?
My co-founders and I have long believed that content creation applications (like word processors) have failed to keep up with the immersive and interactive experience of consuming content on the web. We have an extensive academic and professional background in computer science and cognitive science and felt that we could do something better. A couple years ago, with the emerging adoption of cloud storage services, increases in network connectivity, and the introduction of exciting new devices like the iPad, the time finally felt right to start bringing the pieces together to start building out our vision.
How does Branchfire enable productivity?
iAnnotate turns your iPad into a world-class productivity tool. Instead of printing countless reams of paper, you can access and organize all of your files via a number of cloud storage services, including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and Skydrive. With iAnnotate as your canvas, you can then highlight these files, underline them, add stamps, insert voice messages and much more.
What challenges do you frequently face?
We could be happy being just an app company, but our ambitions are far greater. We are aiming to fundamentally improve the way people work and collaborate. However, executing on a vision like that isn’t always easy. We regularly face challenges prioritizing between short-term and long-term goals. This is particularly important in the competitive world of software.
What have been some of Branchfire's most notable successes since launching?
Our most important success is that we’ve been able to build a successful consumer product that has improved the way hundreds of thousands of people work.
The success of our consumer offering prompted us to expand our business into two adjacent areas. Through partnerships with leading companies in the enterprise mobility space, we’ve created a version of iAnnotate that can be easily secured and administered by an IT department. Additionally, we’ve productized our underlying technology components in the form of an SDK that we license to over 100 organizations that have built their own custom iOS applications incorporating PDF viewing and annotation functionality.
Do you have plans for more products that differ from iAnnotate?
We do! While we’ve been excited to see how iAnnotate has helped our users go paperless, we’ve also found that as our users have more access to digital information, the need to make sense of that information becomes critical. To address that need, our next product will be a unique SaaS solution that allows you to easily create and connect digital content (words, pictures, videos) across different devices and storage services. We call it the next evolution of storytelling, and it will fundamentally change the way you communicate your ideas with others.
What are your goals for the rest of 2013?
We have lofty goals for 2013 – to continue building on the momentum of the iAnnotate product family and launch our new SaaS solution. It’s a lot to do, but we feel well-positioned to tackle the next phase of our growth.
Visit Branchfire’s website, be productive with iAnnotate, check out Branchfire’s BIC profile and follow them on Facebook and Twitter at @Branchfire.
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