Swiss Startup, Frontify Raises $50M For Collaborative Cloud Platform To Allow Companies Manage And Use Their Design And Brand Assets

Cloud-based software-as-a-service company, Frontify gives companies the leverage to manage their branding in a more consistent and efficient way, while also providing a platform for them to centralize and distribute their brand assets to workers in their companies is at it again!

This time it has closed an equity round of $50 million, a funding it plans to use to both build its own technology and expand its global markets.

The round led by Revaia had new backer, High Sage Ventures and previous backers EQT Ventures, Blossom Capital, and Tenderloin Ventures participating. It will be recalled that EQT had led the previous January 2020 round with $22.3, just ahead of the global stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other tech companies who joined the fray had built their standards on the concepts of distributed, cloud-based and remote work, but ironically, the pandemic ended up in Frontify’s favor with the Swiss startup picking up about 300 customers, now having a total of 5,000 customers.

By January 2020, Frontify has about 2,500 companies and organizations including Facebook, Pepsi, Lufthansa, Sennheiser and Vodafone on its platform, a decent number taking into cognizance the growth of the platform.

The Frontify platform that currently helps companies manage and distribute brand assets used by in-house and external partners also provides digital asset and management tools, but what stands it out from these companies (others in same space include Bynder and Canto) is that it not just covers digital media files but how they can be and are getting used.

This simply entails that it is not just a storage folder for logos and fonts but does wider business collaboration suite that tracks usage and the status of projects where those assets are appearing.

Frontify may have gotten a strong foothold on the market as it  gives companies the opportunity to create templates that lock in certain design details, to enable them remain consistent, while looking to create multiple versions of one piece of artwork for a bigger campaign, allowing the work to be distributed by design. The enumerated can be accessed through the web or desktop app, with developers having the opportunity to build their own templates and other use cases on top of its platform.

The company may have prepared itself for this concept of design consistency as it would be recalled that the founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Frontify, Roger Dudler had told TechCrunch in January 2020 that:

 “We think design tools might change rather quickly [while] the single source of truth for all brand resources will stay,” he said. “That’s why we bridge that gap by integrating with as many existing tools as possible.” He described the templating features that the company created to expand beyond basic digital asset management as tools to “bring Canva-like functionality to brands with a much more targeted offering for complex enterprise needs.” (Frontify integrates with all of the standard software used in the design industry, including Figma, Sketch and Adobe XD.)

“We instantly got excited about Frontify’s brand management platform and its capacity to capture the whole branding process in one place, making it the single source of truth for employees and collaborators,” said Elina Berrebi, Founding Partner of Revaia, in a statement. “They have demonstrated their ability to convince some of the most trusted brands globally in all industries, while delivering strong and efficient revenue growth. We’re also buying into the passion and the people at Frontify, and are thrilled to contribute to building its global leadership.”