FiftyThree, Inc.

FiftyThree was co-founded in 2011 by Georg Petschnigg, Jonathan Harris, Julian Walker, and Andrew S. Allen. Former colleagues at Microsoft, the company aimed to build creativity tools that were less encumbered by the dense UI common to software used by creative professionals.

Initially operating out of Petschnigg's apartment, they began work on their first product, Paper, which launched in March 2012 and was chosen by Apple as the iPad App of the Year. Two additional products, Book by FiftyThree and Moleskine, and Pencil by FiftyThree, were released in 2013, followed by the 2014 releases of the FiftyThree SDK and Mix, and the release of Paper 3.0.

According to a 2013 article on Wired, the name FiftyThree references the physical space in which a person creates: "An average human's arm's reach is 53 centimeters... a sort of invisible sphere encompassing head, heart, and blank canvas."

Since its inception, the company has maintained a nearly 1:1 ratio of designers to engineers. The team is composed of employees who have previously worked at Microsoft, Sonos, Google, Adobe, Apple, and Nike, among other companies. As of December 2014, the company employs 51 people.

In June 2013, FiftyThree announced raising a $15 million Series A round of funding, led by Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors included SV Angel's Ron Conway, Highline Ventures' Shana Fisher, Thrive Capital's Josh Kushner, and Twitter / Square founder Jack Dorsey.

FiftyThree collaborated with Women's Wear Daily in February 2013 to live sketch Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York City, and in July 2013 they partnered with Historic Royal Palaces in London to bring technology to the Fashion Rules exhibition at Kensington Palace. They have subsequently partnered with (RED) to raise awareness and funds for AIDS, GE to use art to visualize brain activity, and Skillshare to teach classes using Paper. Skillshare classes were taught by artist Shantell Martin and data visualization expert Catherine Madden.

In 2014, FiftyThree moved their NYC headquarters to 60 Hudson, the original home of the Western Union Company and moved their Seattle offices to the historic Pioneer Square.

In March 2015, FiftyThree announced raising a $30 million Series B round of funding, led by Dayna Grayson at New Enterprise Associates (NEA). With the support of NEA, FiftyThree will grow their product offerings in business and education.

Paper

Paper by FiftyThree is an iPad application that launched in March 2012. Two weeks after its release, it had amassed 1.5 million downloads and 7 million pages had been created in Paper. As at April 2014, Paper has been downloaded over 10 million times and over 100 million pages have been created. According to FiftyThree's blog, creators spent one millennium in the app combined.

Paper contains digital journals in which users can create sketches, diagrams, illustrations, notes, or drawings, and share them by email or across the web. Paper is available in ten different languages, is free to download, and comes with the draw tool. The additional tools Sketch, Outline, Write, Color, and Mixer can be added via in-app purchases. Paper was built using an OpenGL framework, making it the first productivity tool to match the world of digital gaming. Paper flows between tasks with real-time 3D and shadows, includes a touch-gesture rewind feature, and a touch-gesture zoom. Paper released a new tool in October 2012: Mixer, which allows users to create custom colors by "mixing" two colors together in the color well. As of April 2014, over 47 million colors have been created using Mixer. In May 2013, the Made With Paper Stream launched to showcase user creations. The addition of Presentation Mode followed shortly, which allows users to hide the tool tray and menus when Paper is connected to a second display or projector.

FiftyThree updated Paper for iOS 7 in March 2014 and the November 2014 Paper 2.1.0 update included Adobe Creative Cloud integration, which allows users to export Paper pages directly into Adobe Creative Cloud Storage, and the Adobe programs Photoshop and Illustrator. In December 2014, FiftyThree updated Paper to include the features Color Picker and Swap Background Colors, which respectively lets users to sample colors from the canvas and save them to the palette, and swap background colors without losing drawings.

In September 2014, FiftyThree launched Mix. Mix is a public part of Paper where users can share their work, or work on someone else's shared creation. Mix contains templates, outlines, tutorials, notes, and sketches, and all creations shared are committed to the Creative Commons Universal Public Domain. The December 2014 Paper 2.2 release updated Mix to allow users to add friends from Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook to their Mix contact list. The feature Global Search was also added, which enables users to find and follow people on Mix by their names and emails. In March 2015, 157 days after launch, FiftyThree announced that Mix had surpassed 1 million accounts created.