By Riley Kaminer
South Florida startup Third Summit today announced that they have raised a $4.5 million seed round led by Florida Innovation Capital. The company is building products geared toward the creative economy such as Alteon, a tool that allows creators to streamline their workflows and produce better content more quickly.
Alteon is a cloud-based SaaS platform that enables creators to more easily upload, share, review, archive and collaborate on media in a single, universal place. The company reports that Alteon saw a 104% increase in users in the first quarter of 2023. They attribute this rapid growth to a partnership with the Student Television Network and integrations with Apple’s Final Cut Pro Ecosystem.
“This milestone is only possible because of the hard work of everyone on our team along with our dedicated investors,” Third Summit co-founder and CEO Matt Cimaglia [pictured above] said in a statement. “We are united in our vision to build a product on a strong foundation, with core principles that will keep ahead with the rapidly expanding scale of today’s creator economy. We’re proud to be building infrastructure to help steer the future of creativity.”
Cimaglia, a Boca Raton native, has worked in the creative and broadcast industries since his early 20s – including as a TV producer and multimedia storyteller for brands including Mercedes-Benz and Citadel. He launched Third Summit and Alteon to address the needs of his team and their clients.
“When you harness the cloud, you have the ability to centralize your storage,” Cimaglia told Refresh Miami last August. “Now you have accessibility for your whole team.” That stands in stark contrast to the previous standard, which was sending physical hard drives back and forth between editors around the country or even the world. Other features of Alteon include video transcoding and commenting.
This investment comes at a time of major growth for the creative economy, which is estimated to be worth upwards of $100 billion thanks to a growing global group of 50 million creators. Already, thousands of these content creators use Alteon.
“Under Matt’s leadership, Third Summit has built unprecedented partnerships with leading technology companies and developed a truly unique platform that is helping thousands of content creators work more efficiently using the power of cloud computing,” commented Michael Munz, president of Jacksonville-based Florida Innovation Capital, which contributed a $2.75 million investment to the round.
“Alteon is a future-proof product with a stable roadmap and strategy,” Munz continued. “We are excited to be the lead investors for Third Summit’s seed round and help power a new creative ecosystem.”
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI:
- Alteon is building the infrastructure to power the creator economy
- Untitled Interactive is building the future of gaming, from Miami to the metaverse
- Trend raises $3M in funding to fuel its creator marketplace. Pharrell is an investor.
