Inkling Habitat enables multiple people collaborate simultaneously on a single project. It was the equivalent of deciding to create, say, Wordpress instead of manually creating a collection of individual blogs. That was when the team decided to double down and build the authoring platform that would become Inkling Habitat. “We realized we needed to solve the upstream, authoring process that is largely opaque to students and professors but a big problem for publishers.” “The piece of the puzzle we wanted to solve was not what we thought it was,” MacInnis concedes. MacInnis’ team realized it was solving the wrong problem. “There was no simple way to build consistent, HTML5 content,” reminisces MacInnis. By December 2010, it realized its efforts would not scale. A year later, the startup had a mere four titles to show for its work, all of which were painstakingly hard coded using what was then a relatively young language, HTML5. The company started with the goal of reworking textbooks for the iPad, and raised a $1M seed round in a Silicon Valley flash. Inkling will also power a redesign of Elsevier’s online reading portals.Īll that is welcome news for Inkling, which has been on its own path of discovery since it was founded in 2009. And, he says, two top trade publishers, Pearson and Reed Elsevier, have entered into multi-year contracts to use the Inkling Habitat platform to create digital academic titles. MacInnis has other news which provide an inkling (so sorry) of future trends: after years of work, the company put the finishing touches on its authoring platform, the Inkling Habitat, which it announced this past February.

In an interview with EdSurge, MacInnis wryly described the company’s funding position as a “Sequoia sandwich” since it had also led its previous rounds, which altogether total $48 million.

(The San Francisco Business Times broke the news a week early.) The round was led by Sequoia Capital’s Growth Fund, with existing investors including Felicis Ventures, Tenaya Capital, and JAFCO Technology Partners participating. Huge-but it may be possible: On July 17, the four-year old San Francisco-based company announced it had raised a $16-million Series C round. Check in with Merriam-Webster and “inkling” is merely a “slight indication or suggestion.or vague notion.” MacInnis, by contrast, is anything but vague: “We want to be the standard for how people build digital content,” he declares. For a company with a wickedly huge ambition, chief executive and founder Matt MacInnis chose a modest name.

Elsevier inkling