DIY: design marketplace DesignCrowd raises investments before going public

It was reported yesterday that DesignCrowd has raised $7,6M ahead of its potential IPO in Australia. According to the CEO of the company Alec Lynch, this is a very timely financing: the management has a well-planned roadmap for development and the money will help to expand the staff and make the plans come true.

The project was launched in 2007 and is based in Sydney, Australia. The startup has achieved its success as a crowdsourcing design platform, where the user forms the terms of reference, and designers from different countries offer their prices for services. DesignCrowd also launched BrandCrowd, a DIY design service, which it plans to use the funding it has received. At the same time, the service already has advantages over a large number of competitors due to access to the designer database held by the parent platform.

The service had 5 million registered users in 2020, and DesignCrowd's revenue increased by 54% due to this: the company's management hypothesizes that the second half of 2020 was marked by the growth of small businesses in need of good design. At the same time, more and more people go for design services online than traditionally in a design studio. By the way, analysts predict that the design services market will grow to $249,5B by 2022.

The growing demand for such services is evidenced by the existence of another Australian platform, the unicorn Canva. Six months ago, it was estimated at $6B, then there was a lot of talk about going to the IPO and plans to move the monopoly of Adobe and Microsoft, however, since then there has been no high-profile news in this regard in the media field. Let's see if DesignCrowd completes this process.