Australia's 99Designs acquired by European trade buyer
Australia’s 99Designs, a global graphic design marketplace, has been acquired by Ireland-based Cimpress, the owner of marketing services firm Vistaprint. It sets up at least one VC exit.
Recruit Strategic Partners led a $10 million Series B round for 99Designs in 2015 and identifies the company as a current portfolio holding on its website. Accel Partners, which also contributed to the Series B, led a $35 million Series A in 2011 with support from a number of individual angel investors.
Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, although the company was speculated to have achieved unicorn status as of 2016, when it claimed annual revenue of $60 million and mooted a Sydney IPO. 99Designs claimed to achieve profitability the following year. To date, the company has facilitated more than one million design projects and designers using its services have generated more than $300 million in earnings.
99designs uses a crowdsourcing model to solicit designs from artists and allow businesses to select the work they like best while connecting them with the artists for further collaboration. The company, which also has bases in the US and Germany, focused initially on logos but has since expanded into website design, and ideation and brainstorming services. Under Cimpress, it will support the creation of a global small business services platform with Vistaprint.
“In a year when the whole world has had to work together online, 99designs’ mission of championing creativity to bring opportunities to people around the world has never been more relevant,” Patrick Llewellyn, CEO of 99Designs, said in a statement. “We’ve been enabling remote creative connections for more than a decade and have seen firsthand how these fuel the success of small businesses and creators.”
Graphic design platforms have proven an attractive enterprise services play for venture capital investors. One of the leading operators in this space is Australia’s Canva, which raised $60 million in June at a valuation of $6 billion, almost doubling its valuation in less than a year. The company attributed the growth to a shift online amid COVID-19, citing rising demand for remote collaborative design services and interactive presentations.
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