InVision
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Remote workers and nomads represent the next tech hub
Amid calls for a dozen different global cities to replace Silicon Valley — Austin, Beijing, London, New York — nobody has yet nominated “nowhere.” But it’s now a possibility.
There are two trends to unpack here. The first is startups that are fully, or almost fully, remote, with employees distributed around the world. There’s a growing list of significant companies in this category: Automattic, Buffer, GitLab, Invision, Toptal and Zapier all have from 100 to nearly 1,000 remote employees.
The second trend is nomadic founders with no fixed location. For a generation of founders, moving to Silicon Valley was de rigueur. Later, the emergence of accelerators and investors worldwide allowed a wider range of potential home bases. But now there’s a third wave: a culture of traveling with its own, growing support networks and best practices.
You don’t have to look far to find startup gurus and VCs who strongly advise against being remote, much less a nomad. The basic reasoning is simple: Not having a location doesn’t add anything, so why do it? Startups are fragile, so it’s best to avoid any work practice that could disrupt delicate growth cycles.
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Sketch, maker of popular design tools, just landed $20 million in Series A funding from Benchmark in its first outside round
You’ve probably noticed: Design has become central for many businesses that might have once considered it an afterthought. Indeed, with sales and marketing so thoroughly optimized at this point — and companies wondering how else to trounce the competition — there’s now a race afoot for numerous startups looking to become the Salesforce of design.
InVision is one of them. Just three months ago, the design collaboration startup raised $115 million in Series F funding at a $1.9 billion valuation. More recently, Figma, another design player, sealed up $40 million in Series C funding in a round that brings its total funding to $82.9 million and a valuation of $440 million.
Still, if the venture firm Benchmark has its way, Sketch — a seven-year-old, 42-person, Europe-based company — is going to win this race. Truth be told, Benchmark jumped at the chance to back Sketch founders Emanuel Sá and Pieter Omvlee when they reached out to the firm, says Chetan Puttagunta, the newest general partner at Benchmark. “We’d definitely known of Sketch and once we got a look at the company, we were blown away by it. There’s so much potential of what this could be that things moved fast. There wasn’t much of a negotiation. We were like, ‘What do you guys want to do? Let’s do it.’ ”
It helps that Sketch — which has a completely distributed workforce, with designers and other employees based around Europe and the U.S. — has been profitable from the outset, and that one million people have already paid $99 for a perpetual license (with one year of free updates).
Also impressive: those sales are entirely organic, and they are directly from Sketch’s site. Though its design tools were formerly available in the Mac App Store — Apple once gave it a design award and it routinely topped the Mac App Store charts — Sketch parted ways with the company back in 2015, including owing to Apple’s guidelines about what a Mac app can and can’t do, and the time Apple takes to approve app updates, among other things.
Benchmark — which isn’t sharing Sketch’s post-money valuation or how much of the company that $20 million is buying the venture firm — also sees a future wherein Sketch moves beyond its roots as a prototyping tool for both highly experienced and novice designers to build out their experience without the help of coders. The idea is for it to become a tool that teams big and small can gather around. In other words, like InVision and Figma (and Adobe and Autodesk), Sketch is going after the enterprise now, too.
In fact, Sketch is already planning some big upgrades that will be available this summer, as Sá and Omvlee told us yesterday from their respective offices in Portugal and The Netherlands. One major offering around the corner that builds on its existing cloud offering is team collaboration, via a tool called Sketch for Teams. As the two tell us, Sketch wants to be where all documents live and it will allow teams to make annotations and comments in the app.
Sketch is also bringing its tools to the browser starting later this year so users can render an entire document, add developer hand-off and allow editing along with collaboration, all without the need to leave the browser.
All of these features will be made available to anyone who downloads Sketch. In other words, then, as now, everyone gets the same functionality. Asked if there may eventually be features for enterprises that are not available to Sketch’s loyal base of current customers, Puttagunta says it’s a possibility, but that “at the moment, there’s no plan to bifurcate anything. Different modules, different charges — that’s all speculation at this point.”
Sá and Omvlee echo the point, telling us candidly that much remains to be seen. “We need to define a strategy,” says Sá. “So far, we’ve been focused on developing the product, but when the time comes, we’ll discuss [more of these business particulars] with Benchmark and the rest of the team and come up with the best solution.”
What won’t change, says Omvlee, is its focus on creating a product that users love so much that they tell others about it. “Our focus all along has been on making design available to pretty much anyone out there, and then get out of the way.”
Pictured above, left to right: Sketch founders Emanuel Sá and Pieter Omvlee.
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InVision, valued at $1.9 billion, picks up $115 million Series F
“The screen is becoming the most important place in the world,” says InVision CEO and founder Clark Valberg . In fact, it’s hard to get through a conversation with him without hearing it. And, considering that his company has grown to $100 million in annual recurring revenue, he has reason to believe his own affirmation.
InVision, the startup looking to be the Salesforce of design, has officially achieved unicorn status with the close of a $115 million Series F round, bringing the company’s total funding to $350 million. This deal values InVision at $1.9 billion, which is nearly double its valuation as of mid-2017 on the heels of its $100 million Series E financing.
Spark Capital led the round, with participation from Goldman Sachs, as well as existing investors Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Tiger Global Management, FirstMark and Geodesic Capital. Atlassian also participated in the round. Earlier this year, Atlassian and InVision built out much deeper integrations, allowing Jira, Confluence and Trello users to instantly collaborate via InVision.
As part of the deal, Spark Capital’s Megan Quinn will be joining the board alongside existing board members and observers Amish Jani, Lee Fixel, Matthew Jacobson, Mike Kourey, Neeraj Agrawal, Vas Natarajan and Daniel Wolfson.
InVision started in 2011 as a simple prototyping tool. It let designers build out their experience without asking the engineering/dev team to actually build it, to then send to the engineering and product and marketing and executive teams for collaboration and/or approval.
Over the years, the company has stretched its efforts both up and downstream in the process, building out a full collaboration suite called InVision Cloud, so that every member of the organization can be involved in the design process; Studio, a design platform meant to take on the likes of Adobe and Sketch; and InVision Design System Manager, where design teams can manage their assets and best practices from one place.
But perhaps more impressive than InVision’s ability to build design products for designers is its ability to attract users that aren’t designers.
“Originally, I don’t think we appreciated how much the freemium model acted as a flywheel internally within an organization,” said Quinn. “Those designers weren’t just inviting designers from their own team or other teams, but PMs and Marketing and Customer Service and executives to collaborate and approve the designs. From the outside, InVision looks like a design company. But really, they start with the designer as a core customer and spread virally within an organization to serve a multitude.”
InVision has simply dominated prototyping and collaboration, today announcing it has surpassed 5 million users. What’s more, InVision has a wide variety of customers. The startup has a long and impressive list of digital-first customers — including Netflix, Uber, Airbnb and Twitter — but also serves 97 percent of the Fortune 100, with customers like Adidas, General Electric, NASA, IKEA, Starbucks and Toyota.
Part of that can be attributed to the quality of the products, but the fundamental shift to digital (as predicted by Valberg) is most certainly under way. Whether brands like it or not, customers are interacting with them more and more from behind a screen, and digital customer experience is becoming more and more important to all companies.
In fact, a McKinsey study showed that companies that are in the top quartile scores of the McKinsey Design Index outperformed their counterparts in both revenues and total returns to shareholders by as much as a factor of two.
But as with any transition, some folks are averse to change. Valberg identifies industry education and evangelism as two big challenges for InVision.
“Organizations are not quick to change on things like design, which is why we’ve built out a Design Transformation Team,” said Valberg. “The team goes in and gets hands on with brands to help them with new practices and to achieve design maturity within the organization.”
With a fresh $115 million and 5 million users, InVision has just about everything it needs to step into a new tier of competition. Even amongst behemoths like Adobe, which pulled in $2.29 billion in revenue in Q3 alone, InVision has provided products that can both complement and compete.
But Quinn believes the future of InVision rests on execution.
“As with most companies, the biggest challenge will be continued excellence in execution,” said Quinn. “InVision has all the right tail winds with the right team, a great product and excellent customers. It’s all about building and executing ahead of where the pack is going.”
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Framer X design tool steps in the ring with InVision, Adobe, and Sketch
Design tools are becoming increasingly important to just about every brand out there. Today, a new entrant joins the race.
Framer X, a revamped version of three-year-old Framer, was founded by Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk after the duo sold design software Sofa to Facebook in 2011. Framer X is a rich, React-based design tool that lets any designer draw out their interface components and instantly send them over to the engineering team for collaboration.
The key here is reusability and fidelity. With Framer X, engineers can send over existing components that are in production and let designers move forward from there. Conversely, designers aren’t sending developers a facsimile of a button or icon but the actual SVG code behind that component.
Framer X also allows users to collect components and other design items as a package within the Framer X store, so that they’re easily accessible during the design process. Framer X offers a public Framer X Store where casual designers can build off of the experience of advanced designers who’ve uploaded components to the store.
The company also allows enterprises to launch their own private store for use within the organization.
Framer costs $15/month for users, and private Framer X stores for the enterprise are priced flexibly based on the size of the organization.
Framer now joins a competitive landscape, which includes the likes of InVision, Adobe, and Sketch.
The company says it has around 50,000 monthly active users, with 200 companies (including Google, Facebook and Dropbox) using the product. Framer has raised $9 million to date from Greylock, Foundation Capital, Designer Fund, and Accel Europe.
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InVision deepens integrations with Atlassian
InVision today announced a newly expanded integration and strategic partnership with Atlassian that will let users of Confluence, Trello and Jira see and share InVision prototypes from within those programs.
Atlassian’s product suite is built around making product teams faster and more efficient. These tools streamline and organize communication so developers and designers can focus on getting the job done. Meanwhile, InVision’s collaboration platform has caught on to the idea that design is now a team sport, letting designers, engineers, executives and other shareholders be involved in the design process right from the get-go.
Specifically, the expanded integration allows designers to share InVision Studio designs and prototypes right within Jira, Trello and Confluence. InVision Studio was unveiled late last year, offering designers an alternative to Sketch and Adobe.
Given the way design and development teams use both product suites, it only makes sense to let these product suites communicate with one another.
As part of the partnership, Atlassian has also made a strategic financial investment in InVision, though the companies declined to share the amount.
Here’s what InVision CEO Clark Valberg had to say about it in a prepared statement:
In today’s digital world creating delightful, highly effective customer experiences has become a central business imperative for every company in the world. InVision and Atlassian represent the essential platforms for organizations looking to unleash the potential of their design and development teams. We’re looking forward to all the opportunities to deepen our relationship on both a product and strategic basis, and build toward a more cohesive digital product operating system that enables every organization to build better products, faster.
InVision has been working to position itself as the Salesforce of the design world. Alongside InVision and InVision Studio, the company has also built out an asset and app store, as well as launched a small fund to invest in design startups. In short, InVision wants the design ecosystem to revolve around it.
Considering that InVision has raised more than $200 million, and serves 4 million users, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500, it would seem that the strategy is paying off.
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InVision CEO Clark Valberg to talk design at Disrupt SF
To Clark Valberg, the screen is the most important place in the world. And he’s not the only one who thinks so. It isn’t just tech companies spending their money on design. The biggest brands in the world are pouring money into their digital presence, for many, the first step is InVision.
InVision launched back in 2011 with a simple premise: What if, instead of the back-and-forth between designers and engineers and executives, there was a program that let these interested parties collaborate on a prototype?
The first iteration simply let designers build out prototypes, complete with animations and transitions, so that engineers didn’t spend time building things that would only change later.
As that tool grew, InVision realized that it was in conversation with designers across the industry, and that it hadn’t yet fixed one of their biggest pain points. That’s why, in 2017, InVision launched Studio, a design platform that was built specifically for designers building products.
Alongside Studio, InVision also launched its own app store for design programs to loop into the larger InVision platform. And the company also launched a fund to invest in early-stage design companies.
The idea here is to become the Salesforce of the design world, with the entire industry centering around this company and its various offerings.
InVision has raised more than $200 million, and serves 4 million users, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500. We’re absolutely thrilled to have Clark Valberg, InVision cofounder and CEO, join us at Disrupt SF in September.
The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the Early-Bird rate until July 25 here.
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As product development incorporates more feedback, development toolkit productboard raises $8M
Since its debut on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in September 2016, demand for a service like productboard, which gives companies a holistic view of product development and encourages input from across an organization, has only gotten more acute, according to company chief executive Hubert Palan.
Now, with an $8 million commitment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, Reflex Capital and Rockaway Capital, alongside a host of angel investors, the company is looking to expand its sales and marketing and product development efforts to bring the benefits of its toolkit to more companies.
In the two years since TechCrunch last saw productboard, the company’s user base has grown significantly, from 100 customers in 2016 to more than 1,200 companies today, spanning a broad range of industries.
For Palan, the company’s growing user base (which now includes medical device companies, academic publishers and news organizations in addition to traditional digital product developers) is proof of a new demand in the market for more inputs around product design and development.
“Every company is now a digital company,” Palan said. “So every company needs to worry about digital product design.”
The company’s toolkit still includes features that allow it to hoover up information from customer support tickets, emails, input from sales teams and user research, to organize and prioritize features that need to be built.
But now, the company’s services allow anyone in an organization (with the proper access) to provide feedback and track the process of product development.
“Product Excellence is no longer optional,” said Palan in a statement. “These days competitors arise in a matter of months, not years. Customer loyalty is declining and users will happily switch to a competing solution that offers a better product experience. It’s more critical than ever to get the right products to market faster.”
As part of the financing, Kleiner Perkins’ new general partner, Ilya Fushman, will join the company’s board of directors. Fushman, who was integral in locking down productboard’s seed financing when he was at Index Ventures, has a long product history from his time at Dropbox, and is a welcome addition to the company’s board, Palan said.
While Fushman’s imprimatur is one sign of the company’s viability, the investment from strategic angel investors like Intercom co-founders Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor; Clark Valberg, the co-founder of InVision; and Larry Gadea, the founder of Envoy, is still another.
“Product management is a core function in every technology organization, but few dedicated tools exist for it,” said Fushman, in a statement.
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InVision design tool Studio gets an app store, asset store
InVision, the startup that wants to be the operating system for designers, today introduced its app store and asset store within InVision Studio. In short, InVision Studio users now have access to some of their most-used apps and services from right within the Studio design tool. Plus, those same users will be able to shop for icons, UX/UI components, typefaces and more from within Studio.
While Studio is still in its early days, InVision has compiled a solid list of initial app store partners, including Google, Salesforce, Slack, Getty, Atlassian, and more.
InVision first launched as a collaboration tool for designers, letting designers upload prototypes into the cloud so that other members of the organization could leave feedback before engineers set the design in stone. Since that launch in 2011, InVision has grown to 4 million users, capturing 80 percent of the Fortune 100, raising a total of $235 million in funding.
While collaboration is the bread and butter of InVision’s business, and the only revenue stream for the company, CEO and founder Clark Valberg feels that it isn’t enough to be complementary to the current design tool ecosystem. Which is why InVision launched Studio in late 2017, hoping to take on Adobe and Sketch head-on with its own design tool.
Studio differentiates itself by focusing on the designer’s real-life workflow, which often involves mocking up designs in one app, pulling assets from another, working on animations and transitions in another, and then stitching the whole thing together to share for collaboration across InVision Cloud. Studio aims to bring all those various services into a single product, and a critical piece of that mission is building out an app store and asset store with the services too sticky for InVision to rebuild from Scratch, such as Slack or Atlassian.
With the InVision app store, Studio users can search Getty from within their design and preview various Getty images without ever leaving the app. They can then share that design via Slack or send it off to engineers within Atlassian, or push it straight to UserTesting.com to get real-time feedback from real people.
InVision Studio launched with the ability to upload an organization’s design system (type faces, icons, logos, and hex codes) directly into Studio, ensuring that designers have easy access to all the assets they need. Now InVision is taking that a step further with the launch of the asset store, letting designers sell their own assets to the greater designer ecosystem.
“Our next big move is to truly become the operating system for product design,” said Valberg. “We want to be to designers what Atlassian is for engineers, what Salesforce is to sales. We’ve worked to become a full-stack company, and now that we’re managing that entire stack it has liberated us from being complementary products to our competitors. We are now a standalone product in that respect.”
Since launching Studio, the service has grown to more than 250,000 users. The company says that Studio is still in Early Access, though it’s available to everyone here.
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InVision acquires design visibility tool Wake
InVision, the NY-based design platform focused on collaboration, has today announced the acquisition of Wake.
Wake is a design tool focused squarely on supporting design visibility throughout a particular organization. Wake allows companies to share design assets and view work in progress as designers build out their screens, logos, or other designs. Design team leaders, or other higher-ups at the company, can upvote certain design projects or give feedback on specific tweaks.
InVision CEO Clark Valberg said that one of the most attractive features of Wake is that sharing on the Wake platform was implicit, rather than on InVision where designers have to take an extra step to upload their prototypes on InVision.
Wake will continue to operate independently within InVision, and Valberg has plans to integrate some of the Wake tools into the InVision core product. Moreover, as part of the deal, Wake will be introducing a free tier.
“We’re in the midst of a shift,” said CEO Clark Valberg. “The screen is the most important place in the world. Every company is now a digital product company. The world of design is growing and the Wake product represents a very interesting philosophical vector of that market.”
The entire Wake team will join InVision. Wake was founded in 2013 by Chris Kalani and Johan Bakken, with a customer list that includes Capital One, Spotify, Palantir, Stripe, and Airbnb. In fact, InVision’s Valberg said that Wake’s customer overlap with InVision was one of the first things that alerted InVision to Wake.
Wake has raised a total of $3.8 million, with investments from First Round and Designer Fund.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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Prototyping Suite InVision Is Acquiring Design Tool Macaw
InVision, a prototyping tool we’ve covered before, is acquiring code-based design tool Macaw. InVision is a product and prototype design tool used by hundreds of companies including Uber, Twitter, and Airbnb. Launched in 2011, the company has since raised around $80M in four fundraising rounds. The acquisition, which is InVision’s first, comes after a long collaboration between… Read More
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