Powtoon


Powtoon is a British company which sells cloud-based animation software for creating animated presentations and animated explainer videos. The name "Powtoon" is a portmanteau of "PowerPoint" and the word "Cartoon".

History

Powtoon was founded in January 2012, following a $180k seed round investment in December 2011. The company released a beta version in August 2012 and has seen fast subscriber growth since. In December 2012, Powtoon secured $600,000 investment from Los Angeles-based venture capital firm Startup Minds.
In February 2013, Powtoon introduced a free account option allowing users to create animated videos that can be exported to YouTube. The free videos include the Powtoon branding.

Product

Powtoon is a web-based animation software that allows users to create animated presentations by manipulating pre-created objects, imported images, provided music and user-created voice-overs. Powtoon uses an Apache Flex engine to generate an XML file that can be played in the Powtoon online viewer, exported to YouTube or downloaded as an MP4 file.
Powtoon is also available on the Google Chrome Store and has an application on Edmodo.com. Some of the popular Powtoon integrations are HubSpot, Google Sites, Google Drive, Panopto, YouTube, Facebook and SlideShare.
Similar products include Animaker and Moovly, which have free plans, and Vyond.