'Paper' Developers Get $15 Million in Funding For Future Apps and Hardware

FiftyThree, the company that created popular iPad sketching app Paper, today announced that it received $15 million in funding for future projects, which will focus on both collaboration and physical creation.

We are especially focused on two areas:

TRUE COLLABORATION—Social media has changed the way we communicate, but real collaboration has been left behind. Still nothing has surpassed the simple act of sitting down in a room with a group of motivated people. We believe a breakthrough around collaboration will revolutionize the creative process. How we work together. How we discover new collaborators to work with.

PHYSICAL CREATION—Tools have helped us evolve and we've evolved to use tools as a way to extend our ability to express something. And that doesn't end at the touch screen. Moving beyond touch and into the physical world of accessories opens up creating with greater dexterity and expressiveness.

FiftyThree founder Georg Petschnigg expanded on those two concepts in an interview with The Verge, explaining that the team hopes to create "a suite of mobile tools for creativity." Currently, the company's only app is Paper, which is an intuitive sketching app that offers a quick way to capture ideas on a distraction-free canvas.

The app, which was designed by engineers who formerly worked on Microsoft's now-cancelled dual-screen tablet project Courier, won a 2012 Apple Design Award and was later named Apple's iPad App of the Year.