It sounds like the setup for a very old, stale joke. Three guys walked into a bar in Brooklyn to complain about the state of journalism ... except by the time these guys were done chatting and plotting, they had come up with an actual business.


That business is The Atavist, which helps produce multimedia storytelling for digital devices. Last week I found out that the idea was appealing enough to have attracted $1 million of what will eventually be $1.5 million in seed money. But the real punch line? The backers include Eric E. Schmidt (of Google), Marc Andreessen (a founder of Netscape) and the Founders Fund, which has among its leaders Peter Thiel (a founder of PayPal) and Sean Parker (Facebook’s first president).


We’re not talking about the next Facebook here, an idea that explodes into a $16 billion initial public offering in a few short years. But given the heft and the track record of the big-name investors, this is a story about journalism and digital technology that bears watching.


The Atavist’s founders — Evan Ratliff, Jefferson Rabb and Nicholas Thompson — are hardly the first three guys to pound away on keyboards and come up with something that attracted the attention of Silicon Valley luminaries. But most of the time the start-ups manufacture code, not journalism.


The Atavist’s brain trust may have meager credentials as entrepreneurs, but they have deep bona fides in publishing: Mr. Ratliff, the chief executive of The Atavist, is a longtime contributor to Wired magazine; Mr. Thompson is the editor of NewYorker.com; and Mr. Rabb, the chief technology officer, spent much of his professional life designing Web sites for books.


Since it opened for business last year, The Atavist has published 15 works of long-form journalism — longer than most magazine articles, but shorter than a book. Last week, it published “The Electric Mind” by Jessica Benko, about a radical technology that helped one woman imprisoned by the failings of the flesh.


The small digital publishing company received good notices early on for coming up with a template for articles that seamlessly integrated video, easily toggled between print and audio versions, and let the reader control text size, scrolling rate and other features.


“My sense is that Atavist is exploiting the need we all have to tell stories in multimedia, but until recently there wasn’t the authoring tools and the bandwidth and tablet platform to actually realize it,” Mr. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, told me in an e-mail.


Mr. Schmidt met Mr. Thompson at a Google Zeitgeist conference in the fall, and there was a follow-up meeting in New York. (The company is headquartered in Brooklyn and currently has eight employees.) Mr. Schmidt, who has long articulated an interest in good content, decided that there was enough in The Atavist to personally invest in the company through Innovation Endeavors, an investment fund he owns.


I’ve written about The Atavist before, calling it a “tiny curio of a business,” but I might have been wrong about that, as the buy-in by Mr. Schmidt and the others suggests. Already, the content management system Mr. Rabb created has turned into a business opportunity; Atavist has licensed the software to outfits including the educational publisher Pearson, the TED conferences and The Paris Review.


The Atavist is still telling stories and licensing the software, but the founders are making a bet that those tools may have broader appeal.


It’s not the first software bundle that has allowed civilians to publish: Blogger, Tumblr and Twitter all help plain old folks tell stories. But given the complex nature of what is produced, the coming version of The Atavist also brings to mind Etsy, a platform through which people who have made finely crafted objects can market their wares on the Web.


Sometime this summer, The Atavist will release a free version of its software, and people who sign up can begin building children’s books or travelogues or whatever else they fancy, some of which will become part of its online marketplace. Using the so-called freemium model, The Atavist may charge people fees for additional features — like the ability to create an app that could be sold by Apple — and will be making money by taking a cut of sales.


The three met with more than a few venture capitalists who were knocked out by the tool for creating content but wanted The Atavist to forget about serving as a home for journalism. Their collective response? See ya.