Amsterdam-based Creative Fabrica, a marketplace for fonts, graphics, crafts designs, and premium content for crafters, announced on Tuesday that it has raised $61M (approximately €56.85M) in a fresh round of funding.
With this round, the company has raised a total of nearly $70M to date. Creative Fabrica wants to offer more resources for its community of 4 million creators. The company says it achieved sales from 175 countries last month alone. More than 65 per cent of its business comes from the US and another 15 per cent from the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Investors supporting this round
The investment was led by Alven and was joined by LionTree and TriplePoint with continued participation from Peak, Felix Capital and FJ Labs.
Thomas Cuvelier, Partner at Alven, says, “The Creative Fabrica platform, with a fast-growing user base in the millions, is one of those ecosystems where generative AI has a clear use case and adds tremendous value at scale. AI-generated content is a great way to fill gaps in people’s imagination, addressing what would be difficult or overly time-consuming for humans to create. Founders Roemie and Anca have been early to identify the potential of this technology while steadily continuing to build a market-leading company.”
Capital utilisation
Creative Fabrica says that the funds will go toward expanding the platform’s designer network, developing new creator verticals, enhancing the creative generative AI toolkit, and expanding the workforce with senior talent globally. Check out their open positions here.
CEO of Creative Fabrica, Roemie Hillenaar, says, “It’s been quite a ride growing from 30 people to our amazing team of 160 now. We have so much to build for our community that there is no time to waste. With this new round, we have the means to move faster and continue to bring inspiration and resources for the 100M+ creators out there.”
From digital assets to a social marketplace
The company was founded in 2016 by Anca Stefan and Roemie Hillenaar.
Initially started as a marketplace for digital goods, Creative Fabrica now serves as a larger ecosystem of creatives and creators. The platform offers a library of premium content and graphic assets that is available via membership. Beyond premium content, the company also curates and customises its offerings with design tools, seminars, and inspiration content to the demands of its audience.
Creative Fabrica’s target audience has access to resources and equipment across a range of craft verticals, from popular ones (like print-on-demand and logos) to more specialised ones (like embroidery design, home crafts, or quilting).
Recently, the company launched CF Spark, a set of tools that uses generative AI to assist designers and producers accelerate their creative processes by enabling them to generate content using text-to-image. Customers have created almost 15 million photos using Spark in the last three months, a significant increase from its designer library’s 7 million products.
New opportunities inside the ‘Passion Economy’
The ability to create and be creative is now more accessible than ever thanks to recently developed technologies like text-to-image, which eliminates the need to master difficult design software.
This opens up new opportunities inside the Passion Economy. The Passion Economy will result in the unbundling of work from employment. People will try to build a portfolio of interests and endeavours that also allows them to support their living. In another way, they are likely to monetise their passion and build a career on their terms.
Hillenaar explains, “Half a year ago we had on one hand 50,000 designers who were selling assets and on the other hand 4 million customers using these assets. Through our partnerships with organisations such as StableDiffusion and OpenAI we were able to integrate these technologies directly into our product and ecosystem. We turned our 4 million customers into designers overnight, empowering them to create whatever they would like to see in seconds without the need of having learned design skills.”
Currently, Creative Fabrica’s platform contains well over 150,000 paying members, fostering an ecosystem of artists and laying the groundwork for the rapid adoption of innovative technologies. On the platform, designers can produce designs using CF Spark and sell them right away. The company has also discovered an audience with a strong focus on monetisation, resulting in high tool adoption and high retention of these customers.
About the investors
Alven is an early-stage venture capital firm that backs entrepreneurs from Seed to growth round. With $2B assets under management, the firm has backed over 160 teams across Europe and the US in the last 20 years. Some of its portfolios include Stripe, Algolia, Dataiku, Qonto, Ankorstore, Datadog (Sqreen), Trainline (CaptainTrain), OpenClassrooms, Jobteaser, and Sezane.
London-based Felix Capital is a venture capital firm for the ‘Creative Class’. The firm focuses on digital lifestyle, investing in emerging digital consumer brands and related enabling technologies. Since its launch in 2015, the firm has raised over $600M for early-stage and growth. Its investments in Europe and North America include Farfetch, Mejuri, Moonbug, Papier and Mirakl, among others.
Peak is a Seed-stage VC fund that invests across Europe from its offices in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Stockholm. For the past 15 years, the firm has specialised in SaaS, marketplaces, and platforms. Peak has invested in over 50 companies, including Catawiki, Hygraph, StuDocu, Circula, Channable, Trengo, Breyta, Creative Fabrica, Blidz, Whale, and Seatti.
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