Mural Raises $23M to Reimagine Visual Collaboration

I really like Mural and am definitely cheering for them.

They really get UX. It's hard to explain how fluid and useful their product is until you try it. Nothing else I've experienced comes close for:

- quickly and meaningfully getting ideas on a screen

- freely organizing information in nonlinear space

- understanding where other viewers attention is at, and marshalling it to where it needs to be, in a group setting.

I use it both for personal brainstorming and in meetings, and it's great.

One wish -- if anyone from Mural is reading this -- would be better export tools. The current situation where I ask for an export, I get an email with a link later (which expires!), etc, is super silly. I'd much rather you make my browser hang for a few seconds, honestly -- taking me out of flow is super irritating. (If this is intentional, to make exporting harder and build a walled garden -- stop it / don't bother! Your product is already good; I'm exporting PDFs to attach to emails for (vigorous handwaving) Reasons; I will tell people to come back to your product to edit and collab in the second email to them!)

“Design thinking and visual collaboration in the enterprise space” is the given description of the product category.

What does Mural actually do?

We use this at work. In short it's multi user paint, we largely use it as a tool to facilitate meetings.

They've (we've?) done well in driving adoption across the org - dedicated resources, no direct recharged costs attached to use, collateral shared.

Personally not a fan but it does have it's advantages over "standard" presentations.

I often work on design projects with people who live in different nations and my conclusion is, that there is really not much missing from existing tools. You just phone them up via Signal or Whatsapp which is also what you use to share URLs and screenshots. Then you open a etherpad and beginn to write down ideas and ocasionally send a screenshot or a photograph of something you drew on paper. They can do the same. Drawing can be asynchronous, because I don't really see any reason why I'd benefit from having another person intercept my focus while I am concentrated on sharing a concept visually.

I am usually a guy who wants to optimize the heck out of every process, but there are not many pain points for me in that kind of interaction.

I often have the feeling that shiny things like these can become an excuse for not starting work or get in the way of getting things done quickly with what you have at hand.

What, like Google's Jamboard?

Has anyone compared mural.co and miro ? Bot do pretty much the same

23 million dollar series A, and it already serves 40% of the fortune 100 companies. hmmm.