On Vectornator’s $20m investment, led by EQT Ventures (together with 468 Capital)
Today, Berlin based Vectornator announced a $20m round led by EQT Ventures together with 468 Capital. Angels joining include Bradley Horowitz (VP Product, Google), Jonathan Rochelle (Co-Founder Google Docs, Drive), Charles Songhurst (Ex. Microsoft) and Lutz Finger (Group Product Manager, Google).
Jenny and I met Vladimir Danila, the CEO of Linearity a year or so ago. Jenny had found out about the company through our internal tool Motherbrain and Chris Hitchen introduced us (“The world’s best angel” according to Vladimir). It’s hard not to be impressed. Vlad had created Vectornator back in 2017 when he was 17 as a hobby project, and since then the tool had developed into a full featured vector design tool, used by Apple, Disney, Wacom, Microsoft and thousands of designers and illustrators around the globe.
But why invest in a design tool now? Didn’t Figma win the high end market, and Canva the non-pros? Case closed?
Well, both are amazing tools, and if anything, they both showed the strategic value of design tools, and that Adobe’s monopoly could be broken. Adobe who over the last 30 years established itself as the leader in media and digital design, started bundling their tools into Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) around 10 years ago. Last year, Adobe CC’s 22 million subscribers generated $8.7bn of revenue, out of which the vector design tool Illustrator was the third most used tool (after Photoshop and video editor Premiere).
There are a few angles we really like about Vectornator;
Vector graphics is the future. With it’s roots in the Desktop Publishing revolution in the 80s, it has established itself as the leading paradigm for digital design. Screens now come in so many sizes and resolutions, designing straight in pixels in no longer an option.
Most designer have a vector design tool in their toolbox. Vectornator is one of very few serious attempts to take on Illustrator, which, with the success of Figma, is one of very few “must have” tools left in the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Vectornator is completely written from the ground up to serve users in 2021, not 1987, when the first version of Illustrator was launched (called Illustrator 88). With its 5m+ downloads and hundreds of thousands monthly active users, Vectornator has established itself as a modern app designers and illustrators love.
Truly platform independent. Vectornator was born on iOS and has since expanded to more platforms. Because of this it has established itself as the undisputed leader for vector graphics on the iPad, iPhone and works great with drawing tools like Apple Pencil.
Making the web a vibrant place (again). Let’s face it. When Apple killed Flash, it left a gap. The web used to be engaging, fun and visually stunning. Over-A/B-testing together with the birth of frontend frameworks has led to a pretty streamlined and even sometimes boring web. Linearity has some really cool bets for how to fix up their sleeve. Let’s leave it like that. More to come.
Dominant outside of the US & EU. Adobe CC does not work in many markets. Vectornator does.
We couldn’t be more excited to work together with Vladimir, Moritz, the Linearity team and the other investors around the table to turn Vectornator into an at least as longstanding success as Adobe Illustrator.
A couple of slides from the EQT Ventures IC deck:
