InVision, the design collaboration tool based out of New York, has today announced the close of a $100 million Series E funding round. The financing was led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel, Tiger Global Management, FirstMark and ICONIQ Capital, along with new investors Spark Capital and Geodesic.
InVision launched back in 2011 as a tool that would simply let designers build out prototypes of websites or applications without having engineers write out all the code each time a small change is made. The company has since grown to service 80 percent of the Fortune 100, according to InVision, with over 3 million users at companies like Airbnb, Disney, and Nike.
“The screen is most important place in the word,” said InVision CEO Clark Valberg. “Every company is becoming a digital product company and every company has to think about people, practices and platforms that they use to adapt to digital world. InVision is emerging as an operating system for product design, from the idea phase to product development to shipment.”
InVision has been particularly busy of late.
The company recently announced InVision Studio, which is meant to take on Photoshop and Sketch, giving designers all the tools they need to not only collaborate with their peers, but create the original designs. InVision also acquired Brand.ai, a tool that helps manage design teams at scale with cloud-based asset management.
InVision says that more than 70 percent of its users aren’t on the design team, which is part of what has made the company so successful over the past six years.
I asked Valberg about the key to the company’s rapid growth and success.
“Everything we do is inspired by the best design teams in the world that make the things we love the most,” said Valberg. “The design teams at Netflix and Airbnb don’t just send us emails. They tell us where they think design is going and where design tooling should go, and I’ve stayed super close to those conversations to build an organization that is fairly responsive to those things.”
He added that this proximity, and the “authentic, intimate relationship” that InVision shares with these design teams is the thing that most contrasts InVision from other players like Adobe.
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