5Y News | Share Creators Closes New Funding Round to Streamline Digital Asset Management for Game Developers
Help businesses achieve real cost reduction and efficiency gains.
San Francisco Bay Area-based startup Share Creators recently announced a new $5 million funding round, with 5Y Capital and PDF reader maker Foxit as investors. The proceeds will primarily go toward expanding its customer base and accelerating business development across the US, Europe, and Asia.
Ada Liu
Founder, Share Creators
Q1
What led you to start Share Creators? What was the catalyst?
Ada Liu: Before getting into digital asset management software, I ran a game art design consultancy — also founded by me. A lot of people ask me: with a lucrative income already in hand, why pivot to software in digital asset management? The answer is simple. I know this market extremely well, and I'm deeply confident in where it's headed.
Look at how storage has always evolved alongside file formats. We started with USB drives, then hard drives, and now cloud drives for file transfer. Dropbox launched in 2007 — the same year the first iPhone came out, kicking off an irreversible shift from PC to mobile. Yet more than a decade later, data storage hasn't really changed.
I believe AR and VR represent the next wave of hardware transformation. They haven't gone mainstream yet because VR headsets are still too heavy, too expensive, and don't last long enough on a single charge. But Moore's Law says these problems will be solved in the coming years. That shift will reshape file formats and sizes, bringing storage changes we've never seen before.
Beyond market trends, our experience as a game services provider exposed countless pain points — which got us thinking about how to make game production more efficient and cost-effective. Take a typical SLG game: it might have over a hundred characters, each requiring roughly two months or about 40 workdays to produce. Lose just one character file and you've wasted massive time and money. Anyone in gaming, design, or e-commerce knows the agony of hunting down past assets. As people come and go, these assets get buried in ever-expanding servers, or become "dead" assets — too hard to find to generate any further value. These aren't hypotheticals; I've lived through them. These persistent, developer-haunting pain points in game development convinced me the market needed this product.
Our own frustrations, combined with our read of the market, are why we built Share Creators' intelligent digital asset management system.
Q2
How do you envision the industry's future? What difference can Share Creators make?
Ada Liu: According to Fortune Business Insights, the global enterprise content and digital asset management market already hit $11.63 billion in 2021, and is projected to grow at a 14.3% CAGR to reach $29.64 billion by 2028. Based on this data and my own understanding of the industry and market, enterprise content and digital asset management is in a period of rapid growth — I'm very optimistic.
In a global economic downturn, businesses across all industries face fiercer competition, with slowing growth or even contraction. Cost reduction and efficiency gains are no longer nice-to-haves — they may be the only way out. As markets tighten and competition intensifies, the question of how to genuinely improve efficiency to cut costs becomes critical for every company and team.
There's an old Chinese saying: "To do a good job, one must first sharpen one's tools." Share Creators' self-developed intelligent digital asset management system helps companies and teams intelligently manage all types of digital assets, maximizing asset usability throughout the entire workflow. You can find all historical resources at any time — even if they were never properly named — and reuse them. Think of it as Google, but for enterprise assets. This dramatically boosts team productivity. Whether you're a company, team, or individual; whether working remotely or in-person — we want this powerful intelligent digital resource management system to tangibly improve your and your team's efficiency. These teams can come from any field: film and TV production, industrial design, graphic design, e-commerce, advertising — any industry heavy on digital assets.
Another direction we're betting on is AIGC (AI Generated Content). AI is as irreversible a trend as the Industrial Revolution. Many simple production assets will soon be AI-generated — textures in art production (like dirt, fabric, and other materials), animation, NPC combat AI, and so on. We have a natural advantage here: assets already live in our system, so customers can use their own assets to generate materials directly, drastically cutting production time and costs. That's real cost reduction and efficiency gains.
Q3
Why did you choose 5Y Capital's investment?
Ada Liu: 5Y has countless successful investments. I deeply respect their "sniper" approach — sharp, precise, fast — and they took us very seriously, making decisions with remarkable speed.
I also greatly admire 5Y's founding partner, Michael Mao. Before investing, he and I had a two-plus-hour heart-to-heart. He shared his perspective on us, on the industry, and on future directions — all of which I found deeply insightful. He also recounted how well-known entrepreneurs at home and abroad tackled their hardest moments. On a personal note, I was a devoted reader of The Bund magazine back in the day, and Michael was its founder.
As 5Y's slogan goes: "When the crazy you in others' eyes begins to be believed, the world becomes a better place." We believe Share Creators is one of those "crazy" ventures that can make the world better. We're honored to have 5Y's support.
Peter
Investor, 5Y Capital
Q1
Why did you invest in Share Creators?
Peter: Digital asset management software sits at the core of customers' business workflows and digital assets. The market lacks good products for 3D assets. Share Creators has built asset management and workflow software specifically for 3D digital assets, already demonstrated product-market fit in gaming, and won international customers. As 3D assets spread across more industries, AI technology advances, and online penetration deepens, we're very bullish on Share Creators' future.
Q2
What about the founder and team resonated with you?
Peter: Grit. A post-90s Northeast China girl who studied art domestically — how did she become the founder of a Silicon Valley SaaS company? Ada has faced countless hardships on her entrepreneurial journey. At every milestone, she's broken herself down and rebuilt, constantly refining herself. I'm very much looking forward to her blazing a trail for Chinese entrepreneurs in global SaaS.
In recent years, the global enterprise content and digital asset management market has experienced rapid growth. According to Fortune Business Insights, the market reached $11.63 billion in 2021 and is projected to grow at a 14.3% CAGR to hit $29.64 billion by 2028.
Founded in 2018, Share Creators has successfully seized this rapidly expanding market opportunity. Through revolutionary, innovative intelligent digital asset management and collaboration solutions, it fully meets the specific needs of game developers and designers, helping them manage and store large-scale digital assets.
Share Creators' self-developed intelligent digital asset management system helps companies and teams intelligently manage all types of digital assets, maximizing asset usability throughout the entire workflow for organizations of any size, thereby dramatically boosting team productivity:
- Share Creators is built for transferring files of hundreds of gigabytes, viewable in the cloud without local software — a capability existing file-sharing services lack;
- Preview options handle over 100 file types, with assets compressed and media formats converted for platform compatibility;
- Developers don't need to worry about consistent file naming conventions, since Share Creators DAM uses AI to recognize and tag images, letting users search assets with any simple keyword;
- Fast transfer and easy sharing make remote team collaboration effortless while significantly improving efficiency;
- From production tools to game engines, deep integration with commonly used software in design and gaming makes the entire production workflow more convenient and efficient.
Share Creators was founded by Ms. Ada Liu in 2018. Despite global economic turbulence during the pandemic, the company grew against the headwinds: from a small startup with just over a dozen employees to nearly 200 people today, with regional offices in San Francisco, Beijing, and Chengdu. Most core team members come from Fortune 500 companies.
Share Creators' intelligent digital asset management system launched a year ago and received over 200 inquiries and trial requests last month alone. Currently, China's top 20 game companies use the system to manage media assets, with multiple clients paying for regular subscription services — Share Creators DAM has become a powerful tool for their cost reduction and efficiency gains.
At the Globee 2022 Information Technology World Awards, Share Creators DAM won three Globee® Information Technology World Awards, including the highly prestigious Gold Award for Digital Asset Management Software of the Year. It also earned the Product of the Year honor at the Stevie Awards® annual competition.
For teams of different sizes, Share Creators offers a per-seat version based on user count; for large enterprises, it provides an unlimited-user enterprise version.
Apply for a free trial:
5Y seeks out, supports, and inspires solitary entrepreneurs, providing support from the spiritual to the operational. We believe that if the crazy you in others' eyes begins to be believed, the world will open up in entirely new ways.
BEIJING · SHANGHAI · SHENZHEN · HONG KONG
