Two weeks after Adobe’s agreement to purchase Figma for $20 billion, Kaleidos, the company behind open source design program Penpot, said that it had raised $8 million in fresh funding.
13 days have passed since Adobe revealed its intention to invest $20 billion in Figma, the company behind well-known design tools. Penpot, an open-source substitute, has experienced a boom in activity at that time. Penpot now has additional funding to support that expansion. The development of Penpot’s collaborative design software will continue thanks to $8 million in funding, according to parent company Kaleidos on Tuesday. The business said that once Adobe agreed to purchase Figma, sign-ups increased by 5,600% in a single day.
To support the increasing volume of activity, Penpot enhanced the hosting web app’s infrastructure over the weekend. According to the company, on-premises deployments increased by 400%, and the number of starts on the GitHub repository hosting Penpot’s open-source code resulted in the popular hockey-stick chart in Silicon Valley. The investment round was led by Decibel, which has Cisco’s support, and included Athos Capital, an established investor. According to Jon Sakoda, a founding partner of Decibel, the timing may appear particularly pertinent, but it is merely coincidental because the agreement was reached in mid-August, weeks before interest spiked.
In a statement to CNBC, Adobe stated that, combined with Figma, the company will “make collaborative creativity easier and frictionless and empower millions of users to be more creative and productive” and that it “will accelerate Figma’s innovation roadmap and provide access to an even broader universe of customers.”
Penpot still lacks a viable enterprise. Designers can currently use the hosted version of Penpot’s open source software or download it for free. But Ruiz-Mzquiz is not the only person who sees the Adobe-Figma partnership as a significant possibility. More than 400 people gave their support to a post on the Figma discussion Reddit board headlined “Upvote if you desire to see Adobe Figma deal fall through.” Figma, but not owned by Adobe, was the suggestion made on Twitter by Daryl Ginn, the creator of the English design agency Rejiggle.
If the acquisition goes through as expected in 2023, Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma, will continue to lead the company, according to Adobe. That doesn’t allay the fears of some sceptics. Chisaokwu Joboson, a Nigerian brand designer, received over 3,000 likes on Twitter for a post that seemed to suggest that, under Adobe’s leadership, Figma’s simplicity of storing files would end and that it would instead begin to operate more like a powerful desktop application that required manual saving.
The anticipated merger has not been opposed by everyone. For instance, the Dutch designer Fons Mans stated on Twitter that it would be “a dream” to be able to use Figma while also being able to “manipulate your photos” in Photoshop and other programs.
Figma has attracted some designers away from Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools at first thanks to features like straightforward sharing and collaborative editing. Although it is advertised as a rival, Adobe’s Creative Cloud program XD was reportedly only making $15 million in yearly recurring income after seven years. In a discussion on Twitter Spaces, product chief Scott Belsky stated that Adobe is dedicated to helping users of XD. However, Ruiz-Mzquiz claimed that the timing of the sale was ideal for the development of his town.
