Startup gets funding to help you boot Adobe and Evernote out of your life

The startup takes on Adobe and other web giants with the Animation Desk app.

There are few things more hated in tech than Adobe. Whether it’s because of Flash and its many vulnerabilities or the Reader for PDFs that takes as much as 400 MB of disk space, Adobe is – for some – about as appealing as herpes.

That has left space for startups to create tools that do the same tasks in better ways. One of them is Kdan Mobile, which has grown to a team of 46 based mostly in Taiwan on the strength of its apps like PDF Reader and PDF Markup. The company also has offices in China and the US.

“We are one of few companies in Asia whose sales come from the West. Over 65 percent of our users are from the US and Europe,” says founder and CEO Kenny Su. “They are knowledge workers, creative professionals, and education users. We focus on individuals but soon will provide enterprise and education solutions.”

The Kdan Mobile team in Taiwan.

The team has created three apps related to PDFs, two of which are available on Windows and OS X as well as iOS and Android. Kenny points out that his crew beat Adobe Reader to iOS.

With PDF Markup, which allows people to read, annotate, and edit PDF documents, Kenny says the crew is “trying to re-invent PDF and make it more sociable and collaborative too.”

It’s not all about that type of file. Another Adobe challenger is the Animation Desk app.

Take note

The startup is also taking on Evernote with its NoteLedge app. As well as simple note taking and syncing, it has scribbling and painting tools, making it an alternative to Apple Notes and Microsoft OneNote.

The NoteLedge app, available for iOS, Android, OS X, and Windows, pictured on an iPad.

Kenny and the team have tied all of the apps – I count nine of them – to a freemium storage and syncing service called Kdan Cloud. Of the seven million monthly active users on its suite of apps, there are 1.5 million registered cloud members. Three percent of them – that’s 45,000 – are currently paying up for the web service.

As the ongoing struggles of Evernote and Dropbox prove, people are not that keen to pay for syncing.