Dear designers / entrepreneurs / friends,
We're very happy to announce that DesignCrowd has received a $3 million venture capital investment from
Starfish Ventures.
Starfish Ventures is an Australian (Melbourne-based) venture capital firm that invests in information technology, life sciences and cleantech companies, and we're very pleased to welcome them at DesignCrowd. You may be familiar with some of Starfish's other investments that include nitroPDF, 5th Finger and iselect.
Starfish's investment is a testament to our next generation crowdsourcing product and our growth. Since we launched in 2008, we've grown quickly and consistently. We're approaching 50,000 designers in our community and in the last 2 years we've grown 1350%. Securing venture capital often requires working with
venture capital consultants who can advise startups on crafting a compelling business case and investment pitch. With the backing of Starfish Ventures, DesignCrowd can continue innovating and scaling its crowdsourcing platform.
Tony Glenning of Starfish Ventures (who led the investment in DesignCrowd) said: "We really believe in the crowdsourcing model. In particular, we are really attracted to the idea of crowdsourcing the solution, rather than simply providing a marketplace for outsourcing, which ends up as a race to the bottom and is neither beneficial to the customer nor the designer. Alec and his team have done a great job providing a unique offering that serves both."
With this new capital, we're going to do three things:
- Improve our existing service - from faster customer service response times to more designers and more participation payments we want to perfect the crowdsourcing model.
- Grow internationally - we're going to find more great customers from around the world and offer our fairer, higher quality crowdsourcing product to clients and designers around the world - regardless of their location!
- Launch new services - we're going to build some new crowdsourcing-related services. We're not just a design company, we're a crowdsourcing company and a company that loves innovation.
In the short term, we're looking to hire talented staff. We welcome expressions of interest, resumes and cover letters of love from our designer and customer base who are looking for a challenge.
We're extremely grateful to all our customers who've submitted
design jobs and designers who've
submitted design bids so far and we hope we look forward to giving back to our users and making DesignCrowd the best it can be. We hope everyone enjoys our improvements and plans you with more resources and more energy than ever before we're going to take DesignCrowd to the next level.
Regards,
Alec
Founder & CEO
DesignCrowd.com
Written by DesignCrowd on Monday, November 7, 2011
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.
