In a forgotten corner of an office tucked away in Australia, a group of Red Hat technical writers were frustrated. The publishing process was broken, taking too long to use too many tools and too much effort to collaborate. The art of writing was lost under the overhead of workflow complexity.
So they began to build their own solution.
What began as an informal group turned into an internal startup. And what began as a private prototype for the team was soon requested by others, going into production to take over the majority of the company's global software documentation. And soon it wasn't just Red Hat teams wanting to simplify and bundle their authoring and publishing workflow.
Travelling internationally to share these insights at techcomms and software documentation conferences globally, Corilla cofounder David Ryan observed a common pattern. Technical writers were complaining about being forced to use tools that they disliked to create documentation that customers no longer read.
Customer support costs were increasing and companies were missing out on the power of collaboration between sales, support and product. Even more concerning, the major documentation products were ignoring the major advances in usability and machine learning. Content teams weren't just interested in the story of technical writers building an open source CMS, they were asking for a hosted solution.
It was at one of these conference that David first met Red Hat's cofounder and first CEO, Bob Young, who not only encouraged the team to spin out and tackle this full time, but came on board as an early investor and advisor. Shortly after the team packed its bags to join Google Launchpad in Paris, and then stayed on as the first international startup accepted into the NUMA Sprint Accelerator.
During the acceleration period the team discovered an incredible demand to bundle and simplify collaboration tools for technical writing. A very early beta soon snapped up over a 1000 teams in over 80 countries, highlighting the massive industry shift away from the complexity and elitism of DocBook XML formats and monolithic narrative books, and towards collaborative content generation using simplified markup like Markdown and AsciiDoc.
Graduating from the accelerator, Corilla has taken a seed round led by Bob Young's Hippo Ventures, expanded a fully remote team across Europe, the US and Australia, and come out of beta with a mission to be the future of technical content collaboration.
Corilla isn't just a new publishing tool. Corilla is the new technical writing.
What began as a handful of friendly Australians from sunny Brisbane has now spread to a global community. And we're hiring.
Corilla is part of a global network of wonderful people who are building the future of technical writing and content collaboration.
One of Australia’s leading mentors, armed with a rare mix of technical & business. An MBA disguised as a CTO.
One of the original team to pack bags for Paris for the Corilla beta, surviving on a diet of UX and baguettes.
Formerly the senior design at Australia’s Bigfish, Nina created the initial Corilla brand (and our excellent logo).
Full stack developer and software engineer with both international corporate and startup experience.
The globetrotting front-end engineer with a passion for React and classic Russian literature.
The endlessly energetic Canadian designer that is equal parts creativity and enthusiasm.
The former manager of the Queensland Microsoft Innovation Centre & early supporter of Corilla’s mission.
We travel the world meeting the brightest minds in content and communication. You're welcome to join the conversation.