It’s been 13 days since Adobe announced its plans to spend 20 billion dollars on Figma, maker of popular design software. During that time, an open-source alternative called Penpot has seen a surge in activity.
Now, Penpot has fresh capital to fuel that growth.
On Tuesday, parent company Kaleidos said raised 8 million dollars to continue development on Penpot’s collaborative design software. The company said registrations increased by 5,600% in just one day after Adobe agreed to buy Figma.
Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz, Penpot co-founder and Kaleidos CEO, said: “Penpot is seeing unprecedented growth because designers and developers hate working within frameworks and rigidities. of traditional enterprise software”.
Although Ruiz-Múzquiz did not name Adobe in that quote, he did express a willingness to support the company more specifically.
Ruiz-Múzquiz wrote in an email to CNBC: “Adobe was a toxic brand for designers, and now Figma has been poisoned.” He quoted a Document Figma full of images that reflect negative sentiment about the transaction and say that it would be easier if the buyer was another company, such as Microsoft..
Over the weekend, Penpot infrastructure upgrade for its hosted web application to accommodate increased activity levels. The company says on-premises deployments have increased by 400% and the number of get started on the GitHub repository Penpot’s open source code is made for the kind of hockey chart Silicon Valley loves.
Decibels, powered by Cisco, led the round, with the participation of Athos Capital, an existing investor. According to Jon Sakoda, founding partner of Decibel, while the timing seems particularly concerning, it is coincidental that the deal was agreed in mid-August, weeks before interest rates spiked.
“We certainly don’t think Figma will be acquired by Adobe,” Sakoda said in an interview.
In a statement to CNBC, Adobe said, in conjunction with Figma, the company will “make creative collaboration easier and frictionless, while empowering millions of users to be creative and productive.” more” and it “will accelerate Figma’s innovation roadmap and provide access to an even broader range of customers.”
Penpot still doesn’t have a real business. Currently, designers can download and run the Penpot open source software for free, or run a hosted version.
But Ruiz-Múzquiz is not alone in seeing the Adobe-Figma deal as a huge opportunity.
One parcel on Reddit for a Figma discussion titled “Back if you hope to see the Adobe Figma deal work out” received over 400 up-votes, signaling support. Daryl Ginn, founder of British design studio Rejiggle, recommends on Twitter a business idea for everyone: Figma, but not owned by Adobe.
Adobe says Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field will continue running Figma if the acquisition ends as scheduled in 2023. That’s not enough to assuage the concerns of some skeptics. Nigerian brand designer Chisaokwu Joboson gained nearly 3,000 likes on Twitter for a post implying that under Adobe’s control, the ease of saving files in Figma will stop working and instead work the same way. as a heavy duty desktop application that requires manual saving.
Not everyone was disappointed with the planned deal. For example, Dutch designer Fons Mans, tweeted that the ability to work in Figma and “manipulate your images” in Photoshop and elsewhere “would be a dream.”
Figma was originally get compliments for features like simple sharing and collaborative editing, drawing some designers away from Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. Adobe offers a Creative Cloud program called XD that is advertised as a competitor, although after seven years it has reported generates only $15 million in annual recurring revenue. Adobe is committed to supporting customers using XD, product manager Scott Belsky said in a statement a conversation hosted on Twitter Spaces.
However, Ruiz-Múzquiz says that, for the growth of his community, the timing of the deal couldn’t have been better.
“I think understanding open source and open standards (no key vendor) has helped Penpot position itself as a trusted alternative,” he writes.
