Almanac raises $9M in seed funding led by floodgate to bring open source documents to the workplace

Almanac, a San Francisco, California-based tech startup and a provider of cloud-based platform for open-source documents, today announced a $9 million seed funding round led by Floodgate with nearly 100 investors from the world’s most successful companies. Almanac will use the funding to introduce new product features for its 10,000-member community, which includes executives from companies like Stripe, Gitlab, Netflix, and Airbnb.

Almanac was founded in 2019 by Adam Nathan, Dan Bartlett, and N. Taylor Thompson. Its cloud-based platform helps professionals to create, collaborate, and share open-source work documents. Almanac claims to save users time at work by making it fast and easy to discover, customize, and collaborate on knowledge for 15 different roles in technology. Almanac’s mission is to democratize access to 21st century skills, insights, and tools so that no one is limited by knowledge in pursuit of their potential.

Open source communities have made it possible for coders and designers to perfect their skills, optimize work instead of re-create it, and shape the future of their craft. Almanac now brings these benefits to every professional. As the only cloud-based tool for the creation, collaboration, and sharing of open-source work docs, Almanac saves time for individuals and large teams alike.

From marketing plans and sales decks to HR best practices, legal templates, and more, Almanac features the world’s largest library of customizable business docs–all published by its community of experts. Professionals are able to iterate on the expertise of others to stop reinventing the wheel. Over the past two months, Almanac has seen the number of users publishing work and writing samples on the platform grow by 800%.

“I started Almanac because I’ve spent way too much of my career wasting time on work that wasn’t work,” said Almanac co-founder and CEO Adam Nathan. “Tools like Github and Figma made collaboration more social for engineers and designers. We’ve built Almanac to do the same for the rest of us who work primarily in docs.”

With open source work docs, you can read, write, and collaborate in one integrated platform. The technology offers versioning and project management controls not possible with any productivity solution currently available, so professionals never lose work or have to waste time trying to find the right iteration. New features coming to Almanac allow users to transparently compare documents, and push changes or merge content between them in one tap. One change made in a boilerplate can be instantly updated across all company materials.

“Open source communities revolutionized code, then design. Why not anyone with a keyboard? Almanac is defining the future of how we’ll all work. They’re the first to use the cloud to create a completely social work experience for the masses,” said Mike Maples, Jr., Partner at Floodgate and an early investor in Twitter, Lyft, Twitch, Okta, Chegg, among other unicorns. “Almanac’s platform makes it possible for everyone to do the work they care about, without wasting time on the stuff they don’t. This is an investment in productivity for all.”

Floodgate led Almanac’s $9 million seed round, with venture capital firms General Catalyst, Inspired, Abstract, Shrug, Worklife, Indicator, Wing, and Liquid2. The round also features current and former executives from Dropbox, Yelp, Uber, Lyft, ProductHunt, Okta, AppDynamics, Behance, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Instagram, Adobe, AngeList, Earnest, Flatiron Health, Glassdoor, Harvard Business School, Omada, Qapital, Tandem, and StitchFix.