Ex-Microsoft Designers Raise $15 Million to Build Tools for Creatives

Sometimes, failed projects do have happy endings

Georg Petschnigg spent more than a decade working at Microsoft, where he headed up the company's efforts to develop a dual-screen tablet called the Microsoft Courier. Despite attracting plenty of press for being a possible iPad rival, Microsoft ended up scrapping the project in 2010, only to release the more traditional Surface tablet a couple years later.

Rather than abandon his ideas for tablet computing, Petschnigg decided to build on them by launching a startup called FiftyThree and bringing on some of the members of the Courier team. The team released its first product last year, an iPad app called Paper that serves as an elegant sketchbook for iOS users. The app has since been downloaded more than 8 million times, and was such a hit that Apple named it the iPad app of the year — a big statement considering the Microsoft affiliation.