Penpot, an open-source collaborative design platform developed by Kaleidos, has raised USD 8 million in a funding round led by Decibel with participation from Athos and several prominent individual investors in creative and developer ecosystems such as Eric Wittman (former COO, Figma ), Grace Francisco (VP of developer relations, Cisco), and Google’s “Fonts leader” Dave Crossland.

The fresh funds will be used to build new features for designers and developers and expand its community. 

Kaleidos is a Spanish open-source product developer that offers Penpot (launched in 2021) a free-to-use open-source solution for the design and prototyping of digital products and platforms. Penpot is currently used by over 10,000 companies including Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, Bytedance, and Mozilla. Kaleidos’ product portfolio also includes Taiga, an open-source project management platform for managing agile projects used by over 1 million users, from companies such as HP, Red Hat, and Tata.

Analyst QuickTake : Many individual designers expressed displeasure when Adobe announced its agreement to acquire Figma for USD 20 billion earlier this month . This is primarily due to the fact that a significant part of Figma’s growth was considered to be driven by users who were unhappy with Adobe’s ecosystem and customer strategy when Figma previously marketed itself as an “Adobe killer” due to its rich collaborative features and relative affordability. Penpot claims it has seen a huge amount of adoption since the Figma deal announcement (40% growth in signups before the announcement to 5,600% growth in signups afterward) and this is likely due to the looming concerns among these designers that Adobe will improperly integrate Figma’s key features into Adobe XD and shut down Figma afterward to gain back the revenue it had lost when Figma was free.