Sketch, a Dutch designing tool which focuses on empowering designers to create their best work has recently announced that they have raised $20 million (€17.7 million approx.) in Series A funding from leading venture firm Benchmark. Reportedly, this is the startup’s first capital raise since they started working on Sketch nearly 10 years ago.
This is the company’s very first round of funding will allow them to focus on a whole new set of challenges and build a better-redesigned product for designers and their teams.
Currently, over one million paying users—from freelancers to some of the world’s largest companies—are using Sketch to transform their ideas into products. The interesting part is that the company only employs remote workers and has built a strong foundation so far.
In the company blog, Sketch released a statement saying, “When we started Sketch back in 2011, the design landscape was very different from the one we know now. Innovation had all but stopped and existing tools were not serving designers’ needs. We stepped into the market and broke it open, paving the way for a new wave of design tools, built on top of our open plugin system, and Sketch became the foundation of what design is today.”
So, how does it work?
For the starters, Sketch provides a tool for designing user interfaces, websites, and icons for desktop and mobile devices. Right from freelancers to some of the world’s largest companies—are now using Sketch to transform their ideas into products.
Now with prototyping built-in, Sketch makes it easier to take designs from ideation through to realisation, without ever leaving the app, and with Shared Libraries on Sketch Cloud users can have a single source to create, share and collaborate on designs with everyone on your team, no matter where they are.
Hundreds of plugins
Sketch is one of the few designing platforms with extensive plugin ecosystem be it to speed up your workflow, add data to your designs, or create advanced animations. It also integrates seamlessly with many more existing prototyping, collaboration and version control apps.
The designing platform is already planning some big upgrades that will be available this summer, as Sá and Omvlee told us yesterday from their respective offices in Portugal and The Netherlands.
The road ahead!
In an attempt to empower designers to work more closely together, the company will be launching ‘Sketch for Teams’ early this summer. Further, Sketch is planning some big updates that will be available this summer, from their respective offices in Portugal and The Netherlands.
“As you and your colleagues collaborate through Sketch Cloud, we want to make it the place where all your documents live and in doing so we’ll integrate Cloud deeper into Sketch — bringing things like annotations and comments from your team directly into the app.”
Additionally, the company is also bringing its tools to the browser where users can render the entire document, add developer handoff, and allow rich editing along with collaboration, all without leaving the browser.
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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