The Spanish startup, Kaleidos, specialized in the development of products based on free software, has announced the closing of a Series A financing round, worth 8 million dollars. The operation has been led by Decibel, and has had the participation of Athos Capital (promoter of the previous investment round) and several business angels such as Eric WitmanPresident of VSCO and former COO of Figma; Grace FrancisVP of Developer Relations Strategy and Experience at Cisco and Dave Crossland, Google Fonts leader, among others.
This injection of capital will allow the Kaleidos team to focus on the development and optimization of its free software platforms, which are already used by several million users around the world: Taigafor agile project management, and Penpotfor design and prototyping.
Penpot, the more recent of the two, has not stopped growing since its announcement in 2021, thanks to its much closer collaborative approach between designers and developers. It is the only design and prototyping platform on the market that employs open standards for design files and the ability to be used in both SaaS and on-premise. In fact, proof of its solidity and of the community’s interest in this type of free solution is the high growth registered on the platform in recent weeks. “Penpot arrived to offer the freedom that open source tools provide to the world of design and prototyping in technology, a practically virgin market segment. Confirmation of its success is that now, as a result of Adobe’s recent acquisition of Figma, further reducing the oligopoly, the user community has turned to Penpot, as it is currently the only alternative to proprietary solutions, much more closed and less accessible explains Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz, CEO and co-founder of Kaleidos.
According to company data, in the hours after the announcement of this purchase operation by Adobe, subscriptions to Penpot grew by 5600%. For its part, on-premise implementations of the platform have increased by 750% since the news was published.
Sudip Chakrabarti, partner at Decibel, sees the rapid rise of Penpot as an indicator of the changing nature of open source: «Today it is possible to enjoy a fantastic user experience while maintaining full control over the software, all on a robust and stable platform with completely open standards. Kaleidos has had that vision from the beginning and is showing the industry how it’s done. We are delighted to support them and help accelerate this movement.”
Kaleidos’ goal is to put our open source tools at the service of user communities, so that they can use solutions based on excellence without sacrificing ease of use. We cannot allow silos and proprietary standards to be a necessary evil that limits us from creating and collaborating to create great software. This new funding will help us continue to demonstrate how powerful open source can be”, concludes Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz.
