InVision, the New York-based design collaboration tool, announced today the closing of a $ 100 million Series E financing round. The financing was led by Battery Ventures, with the participation of existing investors Accel, Tiger Global Management, Firstmark and ICONIQ Capital, as well as new investors Spark Capital and Geodesic.
InVision was launched in 2011 as a tool that simply allows designers to create prototypes of websites or applications without engineers writing all the code every time a small change is made. The company has since grown to serve 80 percent of the Fortune 100, according to InVision, with more than 3 million users in companies like Airbnb, Disney and Nike.
"The screen is the most important place in the word," said InVision's CEO, Clark Valberg. "Every business becomes a digital product company and every business needs to think about the people, the practices and the platforms it uses to adapt to the digital world. InVision is becoming an operating system for product design, from idea phase to product development through shipping. "
InVision has been particularly busy recently.
The company recently announced InVision Studio, which is intended to support Photoshop and Sketch, giving designers all the tools they need not only to collaborate with their peers, but also to create the original designs. InVision also acquired Brand.ai, a tool for managing large-scale design teams with cloud-based asset management.
InVision claims that over 70% of its users are not part of the design team, which is part of what has made the company successful over the past six years.
I interviewed Valberg on the key to the rapid growth and success of the company.
"Everything we do is inspired by the best design teams in the world who do what we love most," Valberg said. "The design teams of Netflix and Airbnb do not just send us emails, they tell us where they think the design goes and where the design tool should go, and I stayed very close to those conversations to build an organization that is sensitive enough to these things. "
He added that this closeness and the "genuine and intimate relationship" that InVision shares with these design teams are what sets InVision apart from other players like Adobe.