Today, we are happy to finally announce that ftrack, the academy award winning Swedish SaaS company offering a platform for creative collaboration, is leaving the A&D family to set sail on the next phase of its growth journey together with the renowned Boston based growth equity investor Providence Strategic Growth (PSG) and the newly formed Backlight, a media technology company that improves video content ideation, production, post production and distribution, launched in 2022 with funding from PSG. Read the full pressrelease from ftrack here.
Ftrack was founded in Stockholm 2012 by Fredrik Limsäter, who was joined early on by Mattias Lagergren and Björn Rydhal. Today ftrack has thousands of users in over 60 countries working in animation, feature film, episodic TV, marketing & advertising, industrial design and virtual reality projects. The idea for Ftrack was born as Fredrik, with a background at Cinesite in London and Sony Pictures in Los Angeles, had always looked for a project management tool that could enable him and his team to work smarter and collaboratively with projects, animations and VFX. When he couldn’t find one, he started developing Ftrack.
Thanks to entrepreneur, writer, angel investor and later long serving Ftrack board member Michael Hjorth, Ftrack was spun-out of Fido Film, where Fredrik was CTO and Partner at the time. And the team, backed by a collective of angel investors led by Eva Redhe, who assumed the role as executive chair, set off to launch what was to become an Academy Award winning global platform for creative collaboration.
A&D first met with Ftrack in 2018 (thank you for the introduction Eva). We were super impressed with CEO Fredrik and his team. They had a remarkable track record of developing state of the art technology that simplifies the creative process with efficient and accessible solutions, making it easy to collaborate with anyone, anywhere in the world. Thousands of customers, including global brands such as Disney, Netflix, Lego and IKEA loved the tool, and so did we. We saw that the market for collaborative software was growing rapidly and that there was a strong underlying need for digitalisation of creative processes in the media, entertainment and design industry, so we invested.
Thank you, Fredrik, for letting us be part of the journey. We are very proud of what we have achieved together with the team at Ftrack, the board of directors and our co-owners. During our time together, the team managed to transform from a single product company to a platform with a suite of products, such as Academy Award-winning project management platform ftrack Studio, the Academy Award- and Emmy-winning desktop media review platform cineSync, and the browser-based media review platform ftrack Review.
We also managed to strengthen the team with amazing talent and industrial knowledge, notably Mattias Malmström, formerly CEO of Mynewsdesk and Hannah Meiton, with a background from Soundtrack Your Brand and iZettle, who both joined the board of directors in 2020 where Mattias took over the role as Chairman. The acquisition of Cospective, brought us Rory McGregor & his fantastic team. With the help of previous board member David Mühle, Ftrack found Oscar Wall, ex-Chief Commercial Officer. The management team was strengthened with Veronica Johnsen, FC and Magnus Eklöv, CTO. Yamin Yu joined as GM China, and the list goes on... We are beyond grateful to and want to thank ALL of Ftrack’s hardworking and ambitious employees around the world, from LA to Shanghai, we have loved working with and getting to know each and every one of you. Thank you all for a fantastic ride! We very much appreciate the great relationship we have had with all of our co-owners, it has been based on the same trust, transparency and ambition that symbolises Ftrack as a company. We are also grateful for the help and support we have had along the way from the company’s external legal counsel Johan Berg, the team at Nordea Startup & Growth and ALMI. Last but definitely not least, we want to thank advisors HDR Partners (Carl-Sebastian Zadig & team) and DLA Piper who assisted the owners of Ftrack in this transaction.
Even though we are sad to say goodbye to a member of the A&D family, we know that Backlight and PSG will give Ftrack the best possible support on its continued growth journey and we wish the team all the best!
/Your A&D team
