Notable PDF raises funding to build ‘the best PDF tool in the world’

New Zealand-based startup Notable PDF has announced that it successfully raised an undisclosed amount of new funding.

The fresh investment came from Flying Kiwi Angels, the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, Sparkbox Venture Group, EFU Investments Limited, and individual angel investors.

US investors, including Scott Nolan, a partner at Founders Fund, and Sam Altman, president of Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, also participated in this funding round. Nolan and Altman joined the Notable PDF team as investors and advisors.

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“With the latest round, we’ll have the resources to build the best PDF tool for the cloud,” says Hengjie Wang, CEO of Notable PDF. “As businesses and educators move to the cloud, they struggle with the lack of professional-grade PDF tools. There is a huge opportunity for us to take over the market from PDF incumbent like Adobe.”

Notable PDF runs as a Chrome extension, allowing users to edit and annotate PDF files online and offline.

It was the brainchild of Wang, Jordan Thoms, and Manila-born Alliv Samson who studied together at the University of Auckland.

“Notable PDF has solved one of the cloud’s most stubborn pain points: collaboration through PDFs,” says Nolan.

“We are still in the early days of online collaboration. Notable PDF is one of the most exciting leaps forward I’ve seen,” adds Altman.

Since its launch in March 2014, Notable PDF has recorded 970,000 installs across Google Apps platforms, over five million annotations saved, and more than three million documents loaded.

The Notable PDF team plans to spend its latest funding on growing its user base and hiring more engineers. Eighty percent of its users are from North America.

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