Divshot, a Santa Monica-based startup offering a drag-and-drop interface builder for web applications, has raised $1.1 million in seed funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by Rincon Venture Partners, and saw participation from 500 Startups, Daher Capital, Floodlight Ventures, Cooley LLP, Drummond Road Capital, and Eric Hammond.
Work on Divshot actually began at a Startup Weekend event in Kansas City. After receiving an enthusiastic response from developers, co-founders Michael Bleigh and Jake Johnson decided to dedicate themselves to Divshot full-time. They later pitched their idea to CrowdStart LA, got in, and won, where they were awarded $25,000 in funding from Right Side Capital, and access to further investment meetings. They’ve also just graduated from Launchpad LA.
At that time, Divshot also rebranded itself with a new look that was cleaner and more utilitarian, which developers often prefer.
The service was initially built on a popular UI framework called Bootstrap, developed by Twitter, and offers users a WYSIWYG editor that speeds up the process of creating wireframes and mockups. But the plan, explains Bleigh today, is not to develop “a niche tool that caters to a single framework.” The company also announced support for the ZURB Foundation and Ratchet mobile CSS frameworks, proving that point.
“Divshot has the potential to be as ubiquitous for web development as Adobe’s Creative Suite is for visual design,” Bleigh claims.
After private testing with over 2,000 developers, the service was released to the public this past October, where 9,000 more developers were already waitlisted. The company has now grown to over 40,000 users, primarily through word-of-mouth, and other organic growth.
It also recently launched “Divshot Docs,” an open source documentation site for Divshot developers, which provides guides, tutorials, tips and tricks and more. The company actually open sources a lot of its content, in fact.
It’s currently free to sign up for Divshot’s public beta here.