Australian start-up Tablo, a cloud based e-book publishing platform and writing community, recently secured a $400,000 seed funding round from investors.
Lead investor Paul Reining, former CEO of the Catch Group (Catch of the Day), has also joined Tablo as a Director and Advisor. Reining’s strong background in finance and business development will definitely come in handy for this promising start-up.
Other investors include Kevin Hale, Partner at Y Combinator, and John Buck, one of Tablo’s most successful authors, who has chosen to reinvest his book’s earnings into the business.
This is big news for Tablo: the seed funding follows astonishing organic growth within the company, with 10,000 authors from 100 different countries already signing up.
This funding round will be used to further grow the team and develop new features.
Tablo now intends to turn its attention to building social community features on the platform, making it easy for authors to connect with each other, share their writing with passionate fans, and make writing a less lonely pursuit.
What is the story behind Tablo?
At the age of 19, Melbournian Ash Davies founded Tablo in 2012, with the aim of shaking up the traditional publishing model, after struggling to get his own eBook published.
“A lot of people think that because publishing has gone digital, it’s simple. It’s still incredibly complicated and expensive though, and it’s even harder for an author to have their work discovered,” Davies shared.
He describes Tablo as “a place where you can create, share and discover new books: an online publishing community that allows authors to connect with readers while they write”.
Davies is confident that they have built the best publishing tool in the world, where publishing a book to major bookstores is as easy as publishing a blog. “Authors can drop in a document or write in the cloud and reach the iBookstore and Amazon with a single click.”
Davies explained that the key piece of Tablo though is the underlying social network – the profiles, groups and online communities – that help authors build a following for their work. “The next bestseller can now be discovered before it’s been published,” he remarked.
He also highlighted that because Tablo lives in the cloud, writers can create their next masterpiece from any browser window or mobile device, anywhere, whenever.
Davies further pointed out that best of all; with Tablo, authors get to receive 100 per cent of the royalties and have complete control over who can view their work.
“Ash has already proven he has the innovative ability to solve problems and create real commercial opportunities with Tablo”, lead investor Reining remarked about Davies.
“What really impressed me is his longer term vision for the writing and publishing industry and importantly his ability to execute upon this vision,” he added.
In 2013, Tablo was selected to take part in AngelCube, a mentor-driven start-up accelerator program, which only accepts 10 start-ups a year. In the same year, Davies also managed to make it to the list of Anthill 30under30 winners.
