CI Hub Announces Major Investment, Plans to Scale Content Integration Solutions

At its core, CI HUB is enabling users to work smarter – and more efficiently – without hopping between windows. 

The Potsdam-based company gained early success by focusing on connectors within creative platforms, offering an easy-to-use integration that's made it something of a “must-have" with tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office365, Google Workspace, Figma, Sketch, and WordPress. It also connects to stock providers and cloud storage services.

But CI HUB is endeavoring to be even more meaningful, acting as a single source of access to centralized data and assets in a marketing ecosystem. This broadens the landscape for its digital aggregation capabilities across CMS, DAM, PIM, MAM, and MDM platforms. 

That's a lot of acronyms, to be sure – but it demonstrates the potential reach across a myriad of content repositories.

Just how handy is CI HUB? Enough to warrant a seed round from Scale Capital, a Danish early-stage technology investor with a focus on helping companies accelerate growth in the US market. CI HUB's press release indicated that the investment was a “significant seven-figure amount” compiled from new and existing investors – representing a major step in the company's journey towards revolutionizing the way corporates and creatives access digital assets and data.  

"We are delighted to welcome Scale Capital as a financial and strategic partner, alongside our existing investors, as we embark on the next phase of our journey," said Andreas Michalski, founder and CEO of CI HUB GmbH. "This collective support validates the strength of our vision and technology and provides us with the resources and expertise to drive innovation and deliver even greater value to our customers."  

The announcement coincides with CI HUB's attendance at the Adobe Summit 2024 in Las Vegas, which lasts from March 25 - 28. CI HUB is attending the event as a sponsor, highlighting the importance of the Adobe partnership to its continued growth.

Building inroads to CMS, DAM, and other content platforms

CI HUB specializes in developing innovative solutions that seamlessly connect leading content management systems (CMS) and digital asset management (DAM) platforms. Their suite of products makes it simple to access, manage, and distribute digital assets across various channels and platforms, streamlining workflows for businesses of all sizes. 

This has clear advantages for content management and digital experience platforms, which typically offer some level of digital asset management – and in some cases like Acquia and Optimizely, very robust DAM solutions. CI HUB views these channels as accelerators for growth. 

“We see the role of CMS, DXP, DAM, and other content platform partners as being strong pillars of growth for us going forward,” said Nick Stein, CMO at CI HUB. “Of course, this is mutually beneficial for both CI HUB and our partners. Integrating our software not only improves the user experience of these platforms, but in the case of DAMs, it widens the potential user base within their client organizations.”

CI HUB is used by clients such as Ford, Zurich, T-Mobile, FedEx, and hundreds more as an integral part of their creative workflows.    

Investing in the future of content integration

With Scale Capital's investment, CI HUB is poised to accelerate its growth trajectory and expand its market reach globally. This is laser-focused on the U.S., where the company is already seeing significant traction – and a bulk of its existing business currently resides. 

In addition to Scale Capital, CI HUB's existing investors including HTGF, Brandenburg Kapital, the Berlin Angel Fund, and Urban AM have extended their financial engagement. The capital infusion will help CI HUB to further enhance its product offering, scale its operations, and strengthen its position as a leader in the content integration space.  

Along with broader innovation, the investment will also be concentrated on the growth of the company's CI HUB Drive, or “DAM for Desktop” functionality. With this tool, the DAM is virtually mounted and displayed as an external server or external hard disk in the MacOS Finder or in Windows Explorer – making it incredibly seamless, like Dropbox. 

"We are very excited to partner with the CI HUB team to fuel their growth and market expansion," said Joachim Schelde, Senior Associate at Scale Capital. "Together, we will continue to push the boundaries of content integration, enabling businesses to unlock new efficiencies and opportunities in digital content management."  

Why it matters

Connectors have become critical parts of the integration landscape, enabling new tools and platforms to be quickly activated and leveraged for a range of use cases. With less friction, users have more control over the tools they wish to curate, allowing for a more customized and composed stack of solutions. 

Content Integration is a key area in the DX mix, addressing the challenges that exist with siloed data and assets. By accelerating the connections to content in various repositories, creators and teams are able to enhance their access to a broad range of resources to help support their brand initiatives. However, with the rampant scale and complexity of different sources, users are having to take multiple steps to find, select, and utilize content assets from different sources – like DAMs.

CI HUB reflects a continued motion towards optimization, providing an elegant solution that augments the value of content management, digital experience, and digital asset management platforms. It represents a new breed of connector that streamlines the flow and improves productivity around an ever-growing cache of content resources. Given the number of assets and legacy systems that enterprises are wrestling with, these types of solutions are helping build bridges across the last miles of user experience. 

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