(France)  Emil Novakov: Scaleflex simplifies the upload, management, optimization and delivery of media assets online.

A QUICK INTRODUCTION ABOUT WHAT YOUR COMPANY DOES/YOUR VALUES/MISSION.

 
Scaleflex simplifies the upload, management, optimization and delivery of media assets online. With more than 1300 customers in 50 countries, Scaleflex’s Digital Asset Management and Web Performance solutions manage more than 200 Million assets globally mainly for retail, e-commerce, real-estate and news & media players.

Thanks to the single-source-of-truth for media assets, marketers, content creators and developers can quickly upload and find media assets as well as manage user-generated content (UGC) easier than ever before.

In 2022, more than 10 PB of media assets were accelerated globally over the Scaleflex CDNs.

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF?

Born in Bulgaria, raised in France, studied in the US and worked in the US, UK and Germany, I consider myself as a citizen of the world. Passionate about bringing together people from different cultural and personal backgrounds together around a common passion for software, I strive to build a friendly but challenging work environment for our team members to exceed any expectations. After graduating with 2 Master’s in Telecommunications and Computer Engineering from the French Institut Mines-Télécom and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, I started my career as a solution engineer at a very fast-growing B2B SaaS startup in 2011, which became a Unicorn in 2014 and was acquired by VMware. This experience unveiled a strong interest for entrepreneurship and I wanted to replicate the same success story as the co-founder. Scaleflex was and is the logical pursuit towards this goal.

IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME A YEAR OR TWO, WHAT PIECE OF ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE YOURSELF?

 
Focus focus focus, don’t cheap out and think bigger.

WHAT PROBLEM DOES YOUR BUSINESS SOLVE?

Our 2 SaaS products solve media asset management problems for businesses, simplifying the recurring tasks involved in developing a website, online store, and mobile and desktop applications.

Cloudimage helps companies save time and eliminate the tedious and repetitive tasks of image processing:
– automates on-the-fly creation of marketing variants
– optimizes images and videos to improve SEO
– delivers media over a multi-CDN network

Filerobot helps companies streamline content workflows and speed up content-to-market:
– upload, store, categorize, collaborate, optimize, and publish media assets (images, videos, and product documents) on multiple channels

WHAT IS THE INSPIRATION BEHIND YOUR BUSINESS?

 
In January 2017, my co-founder Julian and I realized that the proliferation of images on websites and mobile applications was significantly enhancing online user experiences. While visual content provided Internet users more value, such high-quality images eventually resulted in slow-loading web and mobile applications and higher Internet bandwidth needs.
As a result, we launched Cloudimage, an image CDN that automatically resizes, accelerates, and compresses media assets on-the-fly for all companies that rely heavily on visual elements.

As we interacted with more customers and got to understand more of their pain points, we decided to add support for videos. Eventually, we added storage and asset management capabilities to our media optimization offering and launched Filerobot, the first Headless DAM (Digital Asset Management) combining DAM-capabilities with web performance in a single platform for developers (Headless DAM) and now marketers (Collaborative DAM).

WHAT IS YOUR MAGIC SAUCE?

“Customer first, no useless features” is our motto. Every new feature, improvement, plugin, and integration is made to meet specific customer needs and solve their challenges.

We believe that the combination of media optimization and DAM is key in order to accelerate media assets across the globe. Also, the Headless core of our value proposition allows our solutions to be easily integrated in an e-commerce or marketing stack ecosystem.

Finally, our media optimization capabilities allow us to reduce sizes of images, videos and any other documents delivered online by 50% on average. This significantly reduces the bandwidth needed to deliver these assets and thus our customer’s IT carbon footprint.

WHAT IS THE PLAN FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS? WHAT DO YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE?

Grow, grow, grow. Grow our customer base, revenue and most importantly grow our team members so that they all become better professionals.

We want to continue building useful software our customers enjoy using every day or completely forget about it, when integrated as a headless solution.

We are fortunate to play in a growing market and want to ride the wave and be recognized as a leader.

WHAT IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE YOU’VE FACED SO FAR?

We started in 2017 as a fully remote team as we did not limit our search for talent to one or few specific cities. No offices, no printers, no meetings. We learned how to build a “virtual” company from day 1 in which team members are part of because they want to be part of, regardless of their locations. We have 80 people across 14 countries and 6 time zones and we believe that we have put in place the right process for everyone to thrive. The main challenge is to keep our strong company culture and bonds between team members while we shoot for higher goals and become a “big” startup

HOW DO PEOPLE GET INVOLVED/BUY INTO YOUR VISION?

If you are looking for Digital Asset Management or Media Optimization solutions, or even a technology partner, you can contact Scaleflex Heroes at https://www.scaleflex.com/contact-us.