Brooklyn Bridge Ventures teams up with Asheville angel group for Plum Print investment

Brooklyn’s leading venture fund participated in a round with a new, very local fund in North Carolina, according to announcements this week. Another sign of the rise of the rest: the slow-but-steady proliferation of venture funds in cities of every size.
Brooklyn Bridge Ventures led a $1 million round in a startup that preserves children’s artwork by turning it into coffee-table books, according to TechCrunch. The company is called Plum Print. It was also the first investment round for the Asheville Angels, according to the Citizen-Times.
Plum Print’s operations are in North Carolina but its founders are in New York, Charlie O’Donnell, founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, explained via email. Another founder he knows introduced him to Plum Print’s CEO here.
Plum Print differentiates itself from competitors by doing the scanning for parents, who simply send their kids’ artworks directly to them. From TechCrunch:

Parents can include as few or as many items of artwork as they want in their box. One of the larger, coffee table books that Plum Print produced, for example, featured 800-some photos of art.
The company found that parents who use the site are likely to return. Seventy percent of the company’s 2013 customers came back the following year to reorder, for instance. On average, however, parents usually only order once per year, likely due to the costs involved. This year, Plum Print plans to change that with a new product line.

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