Today we are excited to announce our Series A funding led by Decibel Partners and want to take this opportunity to share what it means for the future of Penpot. This journey has been very long and meaningful, and in so many ways our story has just begun.
TL;DR Err… for those of you that were parachuted here from YouTube or Twitch reviews, yeah, Penpot AutoLayout, Advanced Components and import files from Figma are coming soon!
The Kaleidos team during a recent 2022 offsite event
2011-2014: First we went bankrupt
The team that created Penpot co-founded a company called Kaleidos Open Source in Spain back in 2011 as a software consultancy that believed strongly in open source. There were fourteen of us, and we couldn’t have chosen a worse time to put our savings at risk. Kaleidos was founded with the motto of “beautiful code” which comes from “beautiful form” (roughly what Kaleidos means in Greek) - since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we decided that our code must be open to be enjoyed. We decided early on that if you are a user of open-source software, you also need to give back to the open-source community. This felt like the ethical thing to do, so we agreed early on that we would only sign up clients that would be willing to let our work be shared back with the community. This was a tough business decision - it was the middle of the Spanish financial crisis, and after some challenging times we went into bankruptcy in December 2012. Though it was very hard we never changed our beliefs and I still remember how we all pulled together to make the company viable again by February 2013—not one employee ever thought of leaving and in retrospect it made us resilient. A strong company culture was born!
Part of the Kaleidos team during one of our first week-long hackathons. Daily routine wasn’t much different from this!
2015-2018: Beautiful Code = Developers + Designers
We were a group of nerdy, backend engineers that did not really understand anything about design. Let’s be honest, developers and designers feel like they come from different worlds - we usually work in different silos, use different tools, and speak different languages. But at Kaleidos, there was something that did not feel quite right about separating design from developers. Like many back-end software consultancies, we used to contract out our design to agencies. As much as we prioritized writing beautiful code, we quickly realized that beautiful code was only possible with beautiful design. We kept feeling disconnected from the design of the product and never really felt that the outsourced designers shared the same vision as our engineering team. We knew there was a better way if we could break our pre-existing silos and allow developers and designers to collaborate fully.
We hired an amazing team of designers and invited them into our development process. The results were immediately better and our team became one of the best in the world at creating user-centric products and experiences. This led to one of our first major open-source releases, Taiga, a beautiful and inspired agile project management tool which is used today by hundreds of thousands of cross-functional teams around the world.
2019-2020: The birth of Penpot open source
The integration of development and design created great results - we took on more challenging projects that pushed the agility of the team and granted us awards, recognition and a deep sense of pride. Still, there was this growing concern for the lack of quality open-source design and prototype tools - we always felt someone would come along and create something great like an open-source community frequently does. At one point, our team hit a breaking point: the growing frustration for our designers became unbearable, they felt like second class citizens in the very open-source community they belonged to. I can’t recall exactly how many times I heard the designers scream the “F” word, but it was the moment of truth for the team. There had to be a better way, and we decided to build an open-source design and prototyping platform. Penpot was born!
The Penpot name beautifully encapsulated the ideas and values of accessibility, customisation and constant change and evolution.
(Ahem, well, to be honest, it was initially codenamed UXBOX and then someone suggested perhaps there could be some minor brand-conflicting issues along the way 
).
2021: Seeding our early community
Building an open-source design and prototyping tool is a massive undertaking. We sought public funding in Spain and were granted enough to kickstart a small team to begin working full-time on it. We immediately shared our vision at FOSDEM in February 2020, not knowing that we were just weeks away from COVID19 and worldwide lockdown. You may recall, Spain was one of the worst hit countries in the world by the pandemic but we were fortunate to be able to raise our first external funding from several well-respected business leaders in Spain and financed the rest of the capital from employee savings. We announced our Alpha and won Product of the Day at Product Hunt and received tons of love on sites like HN. We knew we had struck a chord with our community and went on to raise our Seed round with Athos Capital and CDTI Innvierte. Our investors always shared alignment with us on the open source nature of the project and by November 2021 we were able to move the Penpot project to the Beta stage and experienced a new surge in adoption and love.
It’s easy to spot Feb 2021 “Alpha” and Nov 2021 “Beta” announcements’ impact on awareness. I don’t think I need to explain what’s behind that almost backward-leaning recent trajectory
2022: Finding the Right Series A Partner
Our community was growing fast and we had a long list of large enterprises such as Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Tencent, Bytedance and Mozilla that were all starting to use Penpot internally as well as communities like Blender. The project was growing in ambition and we decided we needed to take on another investment to support the project, and set out to find an investor who shared our same vision. Most investors will love what you have achieved but also feel strongly about creating immediate commercial results. We were excited to learn that Jon, Sudip and Dan from Decibel were a different group of investors. If you want a patient investor who gets open source and community, look no further - nobody beats Decibel’s passion and care for your team’s vision and encourage you to build a strong open-source community around your company!
We are thrilled to have Decibel lead this $8M series A round, the biggest series A for a Spanish open-source company to date. We’re also humbled to see Athos proudly following on and being joined by super-angels like Eric Wittman (Former COO of Figma), Grace Francisco (Unicorn Developer Relations Executive), Pedro Castillo (Founder and former CEO of Devo), Andy Fitzsimon (Former Red Hat Global Brand Manager) and Dave Crossland (world-renowed font expert). We will announce our Advisory Board very soon that will include open-source luminaries, design advocates, and other amazing individuals who truly share our vision.
What This Means For You!
We raised this round of financing to accelerate our vision of building an open-source design and prototyping platform that welcomes developers into the design process while offering designers the speed and inclusiveness of DevOps. We want to encourage adoption of Penpot by a much wider audience and continuously foster a great community that believes in collaboration between designers and engineers. This is more than just a software project - it’s a fundamental change in how we all build software and will require a platform that does not require anyone to compromise. We are going to make significant investments in our full-time team to build even more features and integrations as our community grows.
In the coming weeks, we will be releasing what the community has been asking for many months - the ability to seamlessly migrate from proprietary tools to Penpot. This means releasing Penpot Layout capabilities as well as Penpot Advanced Components. Also, we will unveil a completely new revamped onboarding experience that will showcase available libraries and templates to kickstart your new project. Stay tuned for our GA announcement - we are finally moving out of Beta!
The new funds will also allow us to invest in a cloud infrastructure that will be able to grow as fast as our signups and platform usage. We were experiencing sustained growth but a recent bit of news skyrocketed us not one but two orders of magnitude into a completely different scale. Rest assured that we have been supporting many thousands of organizations throughout the Beta period, and are ready to meet all of your demands.
Finally, I am grateful to all of you for coming along for this journey with us. Now is our time - our hopes of finding an open-source design and prototyping platform that can unite developers and designers are finally becoming a reality. Penpot is happening - please join us!
Kaleidos co-founders, Pablo Alba and Yamila Moreno (back), Alex Alonso and Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz (front)
I like also this developer focus. Hope we will see more plugins or features to export directly code for websites/react components, etc.
(this is part of the reason for me to react here, as the folks here share my concerns). This Guild encompasses 
Nowhere else there’s greater need for closer UX / Developer interaction than in FOSS.
let’s TL;DR this as:
Let us start to imagine a Guild design …
I’ve been reading some of your posts and I’m curious to see what’s coming in TaigaNext.