The guy who built Google Maps just raised $30 million for his Office-killer app
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
So it's not too surprising that he has lofty goals of one day replacing Microsoft Office with his online work collaboration app Quip.
"I just think word processing, or typing on a piece of paper that's optimized for printing, is not as relevant now as it once was," Taylor told us.
Taylor's not alone in his thinking, as he just announced a new $30 million round of funding led by Greylock Partners and Benchmark Capital on Thursday.
Quip is an app that lets users create documents and spreadsheets, on top of real-time messaging and editing features, making it a comprehensive office work tool. It has pretty much all the basic features you'd expect from a word processor, an Excel spreadsheet, and messaging apps like Slack baked into it.
"People aren't just writing things on Quip. They're communicating and collaborating on the product," Taylor added. "That experience is just more relevant to what people need today in the workplace than some of the antiquated tools."
The funding comes at a peculiar time, when a number of work collaboration apps that once garnered massive valuations, like Dropbox and Evernote, seem to be struggling to build strong business models. But Taylor stressed that his company's doing fine - "millions of people in over 30,000 companies use it," he said - and that the new funding is not a down round.
In regards to the changing competitive landscape, where seemingly endless number of work collaboration apps are popping up, Taylor said Quip is unique for its ability to combine multiple functions in a single app.
"What's unique is we have the depth of products that's about file storage, documents, and knowledge, but it's also engagement, and that's a pretty unique combination that I don't think many products have," he said.
Taylor declined to disclose any of the company's financials or the valuation of this round. Along with the new funding, Quip also announced it's added Patrick Moran, former chief marketing officer of New Relic, as its new chief customer officer.
"The product is good, customers like it, and the market we're going after is big. That's a really interesting combination certainly for employees and for the investors as well," Taylor said.
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