Australia’s DesignCrowd nets $6M funding to push further into US and new markets

DesignCrowd, the marketplace for crowdsourced designs that competes with sites like 99Designs and Fiverr, revealed today that it has secured US$6 million in series B funding.

The new investment comes mainly from AirTree Ventures, with previous investor Starfish Ventures also contributing. It’s an all-Aussie affair for the Australia-based startup.

The site has gone global since it first expanded across Asia in 2012. The site, which connects designers to potential clients around the world, now gets 75 percent of its revenues from outside of Australia, with the US now the biggest single market – accounting for 40 percent of total revenues.

“The US is the largest market in the world, and while it has become our largest source of sales we believe there’s a lot of room for further growth there and expanding in the US will remain a top priority,” explains Alec Lynch, DesignCrowd’s founder and CEO, to Tech in Asia. “We also see a lot of opportunity in the UK and Canada and other English speaking markets. Beyond this, there is huge opportunity for design crowdsourcing in non-English speaking markets — including Europe, Asia, and South America. 14 of the top 20 design markets in the world are non-English speaking markets and while, for now, we are prioritizing the US in the medium- to long-term we will actively assess the opportunities in other regions and markets.”

The startup is also active in the Philippines and India, where there’s a lot of design talent that speaks English and can communicate easily with clients around the world. It has offices in San Francisco and Manila.

All the design work commissioned on DesignCrowd in 2014 was worth US$20 million, and the team aims to double that by the end of this year.

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