Brothers Michael and Peter Cioni have officially announced Strada, the world’s first AI-enabled cloud platform for content creators. Strada will combine a cloud marketplace with an intelligent workflow builder to help creative professionals improve the quality of their content.
The launch follows months of research, development and debate – all documented in their YouTube series ‘Starting a Startup’ – the founders have also announced $1.9M million in pre-seed funding, backed by Hollywood players, including: filmmakers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Rabbit Hole, This Is Us, Crazy, Stupid, Love), Jason Fotter, co-founder and former CTO of FuseFX, the principals of Ataboy Studios, as well as well an investment group behind Donut Media, Endcrawl and Goldieblox. Panavision is also supporting Strada as a strategic partner, with president and CEO Kim Snyder joining the Strada Advisory Board.
“Innovative tools and technologies unlock so many opportunities but are simultaneously difficult to integrate into legacy workflows. Most people find themselves spending too much time preparing to be creative and not enough time actually being creative,” said company CEO Michael Cioni. “Strada is completely re-thinking workflow, with the goal of giving time back to creative professionals so that they can focus on telling great stories.”
Strada CFO Peter Cioni continued: “Many developers of creative tools require their users to have a high degree of proficiency or specialization. We find creative teams of all sizes often don’t have the time to become experts in every tool, especially when they only need a handful of features. Strada is building for a future where high quality features needed in a workflow become available a la carte through our purpose-built cloud marketplace. And once the entire pipeline lives in the cloud, creatives will spend more time creating and less time managing workflow.”
Earlier this year, Michael and Peter left their roles at Adobe and Netflix (respectively) to embark on their second joint business venture, following a hunch that the greatest opportunity for creative professionals brought by machine learning is not Generative AI, but intelligent workflow automation, which has the potential to reset workflow entirely.
John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, executive producers of TV series This Is Us and early Strada investors, said, “Over the last decade, Michael and Peter have delivered numerous technological innovations that have dramatically improved our production workflows. We’re excited to see Strada further elevate creative control in and out of Hollywood.”
