After a successful seed fund of $2.2 million, enterprise content management startup Shelf is already gathering users from tech powerhouses like Google, Amazon, and Nielsen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbo_s7yrpNY
A recurring dilemma that came along the transformation of file store to cloud-based mediums is the clutter. Finding specific information that is scattered across your cloud storages, easily sharing information across different platforms with a selected audience, and many others, are what Shelf delivers through a single user-friendly UI.
As a writer, I often find myself searching through a mixed bag of unfinished drafts, random scribbles, and other useless documents just to find the right resources for my writing. Within a few minutes with the website, I managed to de-clutter a lot of my mess and easily separate my personal files from the work-related ones.
The brilliance of the app is the fact that it searches for information across different resource platforms, like Google Drive and Dropbox, not just uploaded by the user, but also content shared with them.
Sedarius Perrotta, Founder and CEO at Shelf
“I learned about the ‘search gap’ through my years of running a software company building SharePoint platforms and using Confluence. We think there is an immense opportunity for Shelf is disrupt the $28 Billion a year Enterprise Content Management market,” said Sedarius Perrotta, Shelf Founder and CEO in a press release. “At Shelf, we help modern companies and distributed teams instantly curate, connect and share the knowledge and content that matters most to them.”
“Although Shelf’s search is one of the most compelling parts of the product, it is not a ‘search everything’ play,” reported Perrotta, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Shelf is more like the next generation Evernote that can be used by hundreds of people at a time and still remain easily searchable and organized.”
Using AI, the software recognizes different types of files and organizes them into their respective categories, while tagging them by date, who they’re shared by, and other personalizable tags.
Read More: Shelf integrates Google Drive, Dropbox to sync content curation across platforms
Regarding functionality, I spoke with COO and co-founder Colin Kennedy, who remarked, “Shelf has shown traction as a resource library for an SME’s most important content, regardless of the industry/vertical. But oftentimes we see adoption occur at the department or cross-functional team level first. For example, a CRM consulting practice of a larger consulting company would use Shelf for their team-based knowledge sharing needs. But as the tool gets adopted it naturally starts flowing into other areas of the organization.”
Colin Kennedy, Co-Founder and COO at Shelf
Kennedy, being focused on overseas sales and marketing of Shelf, gave us another example of how Shelf is improving the industry. “Sales is always asking marketing for the best collateral for a given opportunity and marketing folks often end up serving as an information gopher,” he said, adding, “but that is a poor use of Marketing’s time. With Shelf, Marketing can post the best content, organize it in a way that Sales can easily find it in a self-service kind of way.”
The company is looking to use the seed funds to integrate itself with other content management platforms like Gmail, Box, Slack and Microsoft 365, along other features, also growing their team for future development. In the interview, Perrotta added that Shelf will be using fresh capital to teach its AI new tricks, like auto-tag, auto-suggest, and auto-connect, to put up a good fight against existing services like Microsoft Sharepoint.
