Aviary raises $7M to help you create digital goods

Aviary, a company that offers easy-to-use applications for creating pictures and other media, has raised $7 million in a second round of funding. The Long Island company says its technology allows anyone with a creative bent to create and sell virtual goods.

Aviary pitches itself as a sort of Photoshop for the masses — like Photoshop, it lets you create nice-looking images, but it’s usable by folks who aren’t professional artists, and it includes a section where users can share or even sell their creations. Among other things, you could build the aforementioned virtual goods, which can be used in online games. It’s delivered for free as an online service, though there’s a premium version too. Aviary includes more than just images, with an audio editor available now and a video editor coming soon, according to The New York Times.

The new funding comes from Spark Capital, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, and others. On his blog, Spark’s Mo Koyfman says there are two key things that appealed to him about the deal:

Firstly, Aviary is fundamentally democratizing digital creation by bringing free browser-based tools to a previously desktop software dominated market. …

We are also in the very early stages of an emerging digital economy.  I’ve said before that I expect the digital goods market to grow substantially over the coming years and mirror the market for offline goods in many ways.  We recently reached the $1B threshold of digital goods sold, and it’s still incredibly early.  Aviary provides the manufacturing capacity for this digital economy.

There are other companies offering easy-to-use multimedia creation, like Flypaper and Sprout, but they’re focused on presentations, widgets, and applications, not images and virtual goods.

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