Accel pumps $35m into 99designs

Renai LeMay
Friday, 29 April 2011 11:45

99designs bills itself as the number one online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design solutions and has 26 staff in Melbourne and San Francisco. The site provides a marketplace for designers to find clients, communicate with peers and show off their work. The company's investors include SitePoint founders Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz, who spun 99designs out of the SitePoint forums - as well as fellow SitePoint director and IT entrepreneur Leni Mayo. Former Hitwise chief executive Andrew Walsh also has a stake in the company.

So far, over 99designs' life, it has paid out over $19 million to designers, hosted some 75,000 projects and garnered attention from over 100,000 designers in 192 countries. The site's logo store has more than 10,000 logos available for customisation and purchase.

In a statement, one of Accel's venture capitalists, Michael Dearing, said the site caught his attention when he realised that 'nearly every one of the early stage companies and entrepreneurs I work with was turning to them to get great design work done'. 'The team has created a marketplace that is easy for companies to get onboard with, and is also a boon for designers who can go after any of the hundreds of jobs open at any one time,' he said.

TechCrunch has reported that some of the capital will go to the founders of the site, while the rest will be invested in 'international expansion, platform development, community initiatives like design scholarships' and also 'aggressive hiring' in both San Francisco and Melbourne.

'To date very little has been spent on marketing,' wrote Harbottle on the site's blog today. 'Our growth has been based purely on word of mouth. We have also never taken external investment - every cent has been invested back into the business. While extremely proud of that fact, we are acutely aware that for 99designs to grow and take the next step that needed to change.'