Adobe’s $20 billion acquisition of Figan, which was announced earlier in mid-September, has sent shockwaves through the design industry, and not all of it positive. On a business level, it’s a no-brainer that Adobe’s design collaboration tools have picked up a rival. Significant additional drag From Adobe’s home-grown XD platform. But at the community level, designers and others alike are upset: Figa got it right. not at all Adobe.
Now, a Spanish startup called PenPot — which is taking a new approach to design collaboration through an open-source platform that brings designers and developers together into the mix — says it’s seeing massive adoption since the Faima deal. Today, he’s announcing some funding to help capitalize on that, a reminder that violence is always just around the corner.
The Madrid-based company raised $8 million in a round led by US-based Decibel, with participation from Atos and several individuals known for their role in the innovation and developer ecosystem.
They include Fiyma’s former COO (and current VSCO president) Eric Whitman, Cisco’s developer relations strategist Grace Francisco, and Google’s “Head of Fonts” Dave Crosland. Atos is a backer: It also invested $2.6 million earlier in Kaleid, Pennpot’s parent company, which has operated largely as a bootstrap operation since 2011 and produced another open-source tool, the project management platform Taiga uses today. More than a million people.
Even before the Adobe-Figma news hit, Penpot was already making a name for itself. Launched a year ago, it has seen tens of thousands of downloads and 15,000 “stars” on GitHub. Among its active users are 10,000 companies including Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, ByteDance and Mozilla.
Before September 15th, Pennpot CEO and founder Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz said subscriptions were growing at around 40% per month: after the Adobe news, that figure reached 5,600% and has remained consistent ever since. On-campus jobs have also increased by 400%.
Ruiz-Muzquiz identified a market gap that he and his team wanted to fill years ago: Figma and other designer collaboration platforms (others include Sketch and inVision) do exactly what they say on their labels: they help creators and product people build and iterate on work, and how to work together. .
That’s all well and good, but the problem, as Ruiz-Muzquiz sees it, is that design in the digital age has fundamentally evolved beyond what you can see. Developers work with technical people to perform any design-supporting tasks, especially any large-scale design. And yet, in many cases, coding and technical work are seen as separate processes: the design is done and completed before the technical work begins, which leads to a lot of inefficiency and a lot of back and forth, not to mention miscommunication. Ruiz-Muzquiz refers to this as a “crowded mindset.”
“It’s like building two cathedrals with a small hole between them,” he said. “Instead of being creative and looking for a new approach, people tried to apply adjustments to that state.”
To overcome this, Pennpot’s selection is intended to use open source based technology. While there isn’t much precedent for open source in the design community, it certainly exists in the developer community, and so it addresses the creation and use of a platform that can be modified and customized to the needs of a specific user group. Stakeholders. (It’s based on scalable vector graphics, where design and open-source developer tools meet, and that means “there’s no loss of translation when exporting,” Ruiz-Muzquiz said.)
“Because we’re open source, that means you can hack it, host it yourself and modify it and expand it,” he said. “Developers think about this.”
Interestingly, Kaleidos and Ruiz-Muzquiz never thought they’d build open source. Tools For designers. “We started as a pro-developer company, and the reality was that developers and designers didn’t respect each other,” he admits to the sentiment at the time.
In that sense, the emergence of Pennpot highlights some of how that thinking has evolved in general Wide community of technology professionals.
Typically, he said, you can have one designer as many as eight developers, creating an imbalance of power in a digital team. “But over time, developers began to understand that designers are very important in the process,” he said. “This is about accepting the process as an equal relationship.”
While there may not be many competitors to Penpo when it comes to open source-based (proprietary only) projects that combine the workloads of designers and developers, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to think that this could be a large and well-known company. Like Figma (founded only in 2012) it may finally be resolved.
But Ruiz-Muzquiz says that’s not the direction Figma is headed, especially under Adobe, and the focus is on creators, not developers and other technical people.
“It was already enough to create an effective collaboration platform for designers, as FIMA did,” he said.
It’s worth noting that today, PenPot is free to use and while it continues to gain more adoption, the startup has built no significant revenue model. Ruiz-Múzquiz doesn’t seem to be worried about that for now, and indeed there are several examples of how you can build commercial towers while maintaining your open source foundations.
Given the current economic climate and how that has played out for its fundraising woes, however, the startup’s potential and belief that open source can successfully expand into multiple categories, like Design Penpot, has found enthusiastic investors despite its lack of revenue.
“Open source is no longer an either/or but a yes/and. You can have a fun UX and full control over your software. You can have a robust platform with completely open standards that make it easy to collaborate with other stakeholders,” said Sudeep Chakrabarty, partner at Decibel. PennPot has been committed to that vision from the start and is showing the industry how it’s done.We’re excited to support them and help them put their foot on the gas to accelerate this movement.
