Barcelona-based Typeform has landed a $15 million Series A round of financing. The round — a pretty sizable one for a South European startup — was led by Index Ventures, with participation from existing investors Point Nine Capital, Connect Ventures and RTA Ventures, as well as super angels including Anthony Casalena, CEO of Squarespace; Javier Olivan, CEO of King; and Facebook’s Jay Parikh.
Typeform has been on a mission to overhaul the online form-filling experience with design-centric thinking since mid-2012 (raising previously in fall 2013 and 2014), focusing its efforts on design and cross-platform flexibility, so making forms work better on smartphones — two priorities which have helped it gain traction in a pretty crowded space.
But its aims have grown from the initial inkling of using thoughtful design to make form-filling less tedious and more engaging (it claims a four-fold improvement in average completion rates vs legacy forms), to rethinking workflows more generally — becoming, as co-founder and co-CEO David Okuniev puts it, “a defacto tool for people who want to create user interactions”.
“We want people to think of Typeform as more than just a form-builder,” he tells TechCrunch. “It’s a way that you can create any type of interaction, really, around questions — whether you’re throwing logic into that or the ability to push it to different services, you kind of become like building blocks for user interaction. So that’s where we want to head.”
“We allow people to create a minimum viable product with Typeform. So they build out the workflow around questions, they thread logic into it, they can add a payment component to it, they can collect files through the Typeform. They can even add calculations,” he adds. “It’s kind of like the perfect MVP tool because if you think about it most applications out there are forms with a UI layer on top. And that’s what we’re providing out of the box.”
Typeform now has two products: Typeform.com, its original form-builder product, which has some 500,000 registered users at this stage (and ~80,000 actives); and Typeform I/O, its developer API, which lets third parties more easily create bespoke forms with dynamic content, based on individual user data. The latter is still in beta.
“With Typeform.com you create one form and you distribute it to loads of people. With Typeform I/O the premise is that you’re creating the Typeform on the fly — the actual Typeform is dynamic, so you’re going to create a Typeform for an individual user, based on the data you already have on that user,” says Okuniev. “It’s about making the conversation much more relevant, and getting much more granular.”
Typeform’s business model for Typeform.com is freemium, with paid tiers for certain features. While Typeform I/O is not currently being monetized but in the future the business model will be based on usage, says Okuniev.
Stepping up development of Typeform I/O is one of the main drivers for Typeform’s Series A funding raise. Okuniev says it will be opening up an office in San Francisco — hiring there specifically for the API product. “We’re hiring product managers, and evangelizers and more developers out in the U.S.,” he notes.
The European startup won’t be leaving Barcelona, though, with the team there also set to grow to 100 people. “This is a great place to work, a great place to be, we can attract people from all over Europe to this city,” says Okuniev. “We also want to be in the U.S. — but it doesn’t make sense for the core product to be in the U.S.
“The reason why we want to be in the U.S. with Typeform I/O is that we want to be much closer to the whole developer ecosystem. You don’t need to have that here with Typeform.com — it’s a more self-service product… You don’t have to reach out to them to get them on board. It’s all automated.”