Australian startup 99designs has raised a Series A investment of $35 million led by Accel Partners and joined by angel investors Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal, Dave Goldberg of Survey Monkey, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Squarespace founder Anthony Casalena.
99designs runs an online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design services. The investment is the third Accel has made in an Australian startup in the past year.
99designs was founded in Melbourne Australia in February 2008, when co-founders Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz – the entrepreneurs behind Flippa.com and Learnable.com – spun it out of SitePoint. 99designs, which employs 26 staff in Melbourne and San Francisco, was bootstrapped and is profitable, and enjoys 120 percent year-on-year growth.
• 99designs has over 100,000 designers in 192 countries
• The company has paid out $19 million to designers to date
• Over 75,000 projects have been successfully completed and a new design is uploaded to 99designs every six seconds
• There are more than 10,000 logos available for customization and sale in their logo store
99Designs is Accel Partners third investment in Australia, including Atlassian Software and OzForex.
