99designs,the company that has popularized the crowdsourcing model where designers compete to get paid, is announcing that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding.
Founded back in 2008, 99designs was bootstrapped for its first few years before raising a big $35 million round led by Accel Partners. The round’s a bit smaller this time around, but CEO Patrick Llewellyn said this was “not about the money we could raise.”
Instead, by raising money from Recruit Strategic Partners (the Silicon Valley-based venture arm of Japanese advertising and human resources company Recruit Holdings Co.) Llewellyn is hoping to build a partnership that helps 99designs move into Japan, and more broadly into Asia.
“We have an established business and model that doesn’t require significant capital to fuel its growth, but gaining access to real local market knowledge and distribution channels, coupled with the opportunity to gain broader access to enterprise customers within the Recruit network, was an opportunity too good to pass up,” he said.
As for why he’s interested in Japan in particular, Llewellyn pointed to the growth of labor marketplaces and the on-demand economy, as well as the large market and “steep history in design.”
Llewellyn added that 40 percent of the company’s business comes from outside North America, up from 20 percent three years ago: “Our aim is to get our business to a 50/50 split over the coming years, and Asia represents the next step in this strategy.” (99designs was founded in Melbourne, Australia and still has an office there, but it’s now officially headquartered in San Francisco.)
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