As fast-paced and innovative as the tech industry is, the digital infrastructure for content creation still has some catching-up to do when it comes to meeting the increasing demands of the creative industry.
Alteon.io, whose parent company is Third Summit, is a comprehensive cloud-based SaaS ecosystem that lets users upload, share, store and collaborate on creative projects—all in one space—and is closing the tech gap for creators allowing for smoother collaboration in the media industry.
Noting the growth and development of the creative industry in the Toronto Region, Alteon has expanded their operations to Toronto to be at the forefront of the region’s thriving production industry and take advantage of the Region’s resilient tech talent pool.
We connected with Matt Cimaglia, Co-Founder and CEO of Alteon.io, to learn more about the decision to expand to Toronto and their exciting plans for the region.
Can you tell us more about Alteon.io and what problems you’re solving?
MC: I co-founded Alteon.io after spending more than 20 years running my own creative agency. No matter how strong technology became, I kept noticing the same pain points recurring around the industry, affecting everyone from independent freelancers to enterprise studios. For example—many people outside the industry don’t realize this—but a significant number of creative professionals still transfer files by physically shipping hard drives to one another, because video file sizes have outpaced digital infrastructure for the last decade. It makes creative collaboration unnecessarily cumbersome. That’s just one of the problems we’re solving.
What did you find attractive about setting up in Toronto and the Canadian market?
MC: Toronto is a perfect city for us to establish a presence. From an engineering perspective, the sheer amount of tech talent is unrivaled. It’s also in the same time zone as our offices in New York and Florida, so we’ll be able to have a coordinated and responsive workflow while maintaining a remote company.
Additionally, Toronto is ground zero for Canada’s booming production industry, with millions of dollars of new investment being spent in studio spaces and expansions. Other companies in our industry are currently moving into Toronto as well, including Netflix, which just opened their first Canadian office in April. These trends tell us that companies like ours, in the creative tech economy, are thriving and secure in Toronto.
How is Alteon approaching the Canadian market?
MC: We will begin by setting up a development team there, starting immediately. We’re hosting a recruitment mixer on May 18 at Pauper’s Pub in the Annex from 6 to 9 p.m.—we’re specifically looking for front-end, back-end and DevOps engineers, a technical product manager and a quality assurance automation engineer, but we encourage anyone interested in our mission to come by, introduce themselves and get to know what we’re like.
As a “remote-first” company, how will you keep Canadian staff engaged with the rest of the company?
MC: While all employees will be remote, and we will not have an office lease in Canada, we will offer passes to a coworking space to our team in the Toronto area, so they can work in a team environment if they choose. One of our company leaders will also fly in monthly for regular team get-togethers.
We will also facilitate short visits between New York and Toronto for engineers and invite all interested Canadian staff to join us at major industry events such as the NAB Show, North America’s largest convention for broadcast professionals, where Alteon.io just won 2023 Product of the Year and TV Tech Best of Show awards.
On the virtual side, we also host daily 30-minute scrums to contribute and view progress, weekly company meetings and occasional company-wide town halls and celebrations.
Can you share some of the projects that your Canadian employees may have the opportunity to work on?
MC: As far as recruiting tech talent, we have a great work environment for experienced developers who understand video or are passionate about film and television. We also have integrations and partnerships with Apple, Adobe, IBM and other industry leaders, so our developers—including our new Canadian employees—will get the chance to work side-by-side with those kinds of world-class teams and gain unique access and insight into their workflows.
Our Canadian team will be developing and improving the Alteon ecosystem in various ways, helping to pave the way for faster and more efficient media processing and management. They will have the opportunity to work on exciting and innovative projects that push the boundaries of what’s possible in the media industry, leveraging big data technologies to horizontally scale our processes and integrating them more deeply with machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Some goals for 2023 include reducing the time it takes to upload and transcode media to the cloud – so video editors can begin working on media immediately after footage is shot – and developing a digital publishing tool that allows content creators to post their work directly to social media and distribution platforms.
These projects are fundamentally shaping the future of content creation and situating our employees at the forefront of next-generation technology. If anyone wants to join us, visit thirdsummit.com/careers or email careers@thirdsummit.com with your resume.
Courtney Bowen is the Senior Advisor of Talent Partnerships at Toronto Global.
