Open source projects continue to stand out as an attractive alternative to proprietary software for those seeking flexibility in the tools they work with and price leverage. Today, one of his juggernauts in the design world is announcing funding. Penpot, an open-source platform for designers and developers to collaborate in a single environment, is used to drive more adoption after reaching 250,000 users and 20,000 “stars” this month raised $12 million in equity funding. .
Behind those numbers, Penpot’s user numbers surged last year following Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figma, growing 5,600% to 100,000 users in a matter of weeks. His 250,000 users on the current penpot represent a 500% user growth rate.
Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz, CEO and co-founder of Penpot, said in an interview this week.
The logic behind Penpot was to create a tool that designers use and love, but that is equally receptive to their developer counterparts. Including it in the collaboration process earlier than usual is essential. “We have over a tenth as many developers as designers, which means that even though we have a million accounts on Figma, they are just designers and they cut out an important audience. Sure, we want to have more designers in the world, but we keep adding more developers.” Building something that both can use at the same time is “a huge opportunity for Penpot,” he says. I was.
A portion of the funds will be used to build more tools that can be used both in the cloud and in self-hosted and local environments. In fact, the news coincides with Penpot releasing many of these out of beta, and speaks to building a joint design and coding sensibility.
These include a suite of new “Flex Layout” tools for building responsive layouts with CSS. A tool that allows the user to tap on the browser’s memory to increase his cache of collaboration project memory up to 16 GB (2 GB used to be the industry standard limit). Improved code inspection functionality. Increased agility to add occasional contributors to your project. more.
Like everything at Penpot, they are all completely free to use. The company has yet to introduce any paid features or services. So the long-term question is not only whether Penpot can continue to reach a critical mass of users for its open source tools, but also how to monetize the platform. Can you find an effective way to convert and retain users?
This latest round is led by Decibel, a VC partnered with Cisco, the company’s $8 million Series A, announced in September 2022. Many prominent angels and other existing supporters, including Athos, also attended.
Ruiz-Múzquiz said the round is somewhere in “series A+” territory. It’s not part of the previous Series A, but it’s a clear precursor to the Series B. The company — Ruiz-Múzquiz has confirmed that the round has doubled his valuation, but did not disclose the actual numbers. One more detail: Kaleidos said it could have raised up to $20 million this time around. This shows that the hottest and most high-profile startups are not facing the same funding challenges as other startups in the space.
Penpot’s emergence takes place at the confluence of several other developments.
Adobe’s acquisition of the popular design tool Figma has shocked the design community. Given that Adobe has bigger challenges around selling its own design and marketing tools, many predicted the deal would spell the end of the product they knew and loved. rice field. At the same time, we have witnessed a growing interest in open source alternatives to existing products. That comes in the wake of another big M&A that has occurred in the past six months (Elon Musk buying his Twitter for $44 billion), and the platform is also worried about its future, currently the most watched. I’m experimenting with alternatives using Mastodon, an open source federation approach that has attracted a lot of attention.
Combining the two gives Penpot a kind of perfect storm. For designers and their partners to explore what else lies beyond Figma and wake up to the possibilities of open source, here are the products to try.
Over 20,000 teams currently use the product, including groups from Mozilla, Accenture, ByteDance, IBM, Google and Microsoft. It’s one of the fastest growing open source projects today, according to Runa Capital’s ROSS Index.
Penpot’s claim is that they have built a very flexible product compared to other products on the market, especially Figma. You can use it as cloud-based his SaaS or host it in your own environment. The platform allows coders and designers to work on the same task at the same time in real time. This is a big change from how his two groups of people work now, where wireframes are typically put together by a designer and then handed off to coders for building. their specifications. Of course, as the project evolves, going back and forth between that process and the changes that occur along the way will cost you a lot of time and money.
What’s remarkable about this funding and the startup itself is that as far as the business model goes, it’s building in a pre-Covid-19 way. I mean, not focused on revenue at all, not even messing with where and how you charge for services and features, instead allowing you to use all the tools in today’s penpot for free This keeps the barriers to entry very low.
Ruiz-Múzquiz said this is what investors are strongly recommending at the moment. “John [Sakoda, one of the founders at Decibel] “Don’t let the paid enterprise features fool you. You can learn what it is,” he said.
One of the things that the growing interest in open source means is that many investors are sniffing the space to add their own “open source” startups to their portfolios. What’s interesting is that Decibel sees his Penpot as a playing field. At this time, other technologies are picking up some of the other work to build digital experiences.
“Penpot is the first platform that enables designers and developers to work closely together to deliver a great user experience. “Technologies such as generative AI are unlocking tremendous creativity among designers and developers. We want our teams to be able to take full advantage of the moment.” And we are proud to continue to support Penpot.”
