Penpot, a Madrid, Spain-based open-source, collaborative design and prototyping platform by Kaleidos, has raised $8 million in Series A to build more features for designers and developers and nurture its growing community.
Decibel led the round, with existing investor Athos Capital and a number of angels participating, including VSCO president and former Figma COO Eric Wittman, Cisco’s VP of Developer Relations Strategy and Experience Grace Francisco, and Google Fonts leader Dave Crossland.
“Penpot is seeing unprecedented growth because designers and developers hate working within the silos and rigidity of traditional enterprise software,” said Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz, CEO and co-founder of Penpot. “Penpot gives them what they want: freedom, flexibility, and deep collaboration across domains. As an open-source company, we also want to ensure there is always a free alternative for everyone. This new funding will help us continue to showcase the power of open standards and interoperability by default.”
The creators of Penpot, Kaleidos, have a track record of building community adoption and commercial success without sacrificing one for the other. Its other open-source project, the project management tool Taiga, is used by more than a million people worldwide, including companies like HP, Red Hat, and Tata.
Taiga’s business model includes a generous free tier, SaaS on top of the open-source project, and options for on-premise deployments self-hosted for free or managed by Kaleidos.
Company: KALEIDOS INC SUCURSAL EN ESPAÑA S.L.
Raised: $8.0M
Round: Series A
Funding Month: September 2022
Lead Investors: Decibel
Additional Investors: Athos Capital, Eric Wittman, and Dave Crossland
Company Website: https://penpot.app/
Software Category: Open Source design and Prototyping platform
About the Company: Kaleidos is an open-source startup founded in 2011 by a group of developers who worked together in the technology consultancy world. The COVID pandemic saw them becoming a 100% open-source product company. They have a non-negotiable mission to generate a positive impact on society through open-source software and innovation. Their sole focus is developing and optimizing their two open-source products for digital cross-functional teams: Penpot, the first open-source design and prototyping platform, and Taiga, the project management tool for agile teams. After its launch last year, Penpot had tens of thousands of downloads and 15,000 GitHub stars. Its creative flexibility for designers and unique integration into agile development make Penpot an ideal collaboration tool that welcomes developers into the design process. Its on-premise option aided massive installations. Penpot is used by Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, Bytedance, and Mozilla.
Source: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220927005980/en/Penpot-Raises-8M-to-Keep-Designers-and-Developers-in-Sync-While-They-Build-Beautiful-Products