We’re happy to announce that our another dream came true – we recently finalized the investment process closed with a total of $1.6M from Freestyle, a16z, and others.
You may have heard about our ealier endeavour in seeking investment in Silicon Valley. At that time some of the most important investors in Silicon Valley believed in UXPin and decided to join us. Andreessen/Horowitz (investor of e.g. Facebook and Instagram), IDG Ventures (VC fund connected to IDG – the biggest publisher of IT magazines in the world), Gil Penchina (angel investor in e.g. Paypal and LinkedIn), Mansour Salame (Band of Angels) and Innovation Nest (our first investor) invested in our company. Encouraged by that success we made another trip to the USA shortly after to take our chances once again.
The first closing took us a few months. The second one took us a few weeks and we were oversubscribed with investors wanting to join UXPin’s vision. Growing awareness of the brand and our growth results made that outstanding result possible. Which means – we could not have done this without you, dear UXPin customers and fans. All the support that you give us empowers the whole team to achieve great things and dare for the extraordinary. On behalf of the UXPin team: thank you!
So who joined us by this entire process of fundraising? a16z seed, Freestyle Capital, IDG Ventures, Mansour Salame (Band of Angels), Innovation Nest and a vast number of Angel Investors, e.g. Gil Penchina (investor in LinkedIn, PayPal, former VP of eBay), Eric Ries (author of “The Lean Startup”), Jeff Huber (SVP of Google), Joshua Schachter (founder of Delicious), Julia Popowitz (former DGC at Facebook).
On a side note – as we take a broader look at how business values design and UX design, in particular, we find ourselves as part of an emerging trend. Along with facts like high ranks in the best jobs in the USA, competing to software engineers salaries of designers, acq-hires of design teams and latest acquirement of Nest, UXPin shows that user experience design changes the world and there’s strong evidence for a major paradigm shift of developing products and leading companies. I think we can expect some amazing phenomena stemming from this trend. Technology has probably never before been so user-centric, therefore so “human” – this seems like a good way of shaping future worth living in. We’re more than excited to play a role in this.
P.S. Here’s some of the press coverage on the topic:
