Sep 28, 2023

In April 2021, Jorn van Dijk and Koen Bok, the cofounders of the design software startup Framer, were facing some tough news. Their company’s prototyping tool for detailed app and website mockups had been a hit among a small group of designers, but after six years, revenues had slumped from their peak of $4 million in late 2019. “I said, this wasn’t working and we should figure out where to go from there,” Van Dijk told Forbes. Over lunch at Amsterdam cafe Mokum (Yiddish for the Netherlands’ largest city), the two former Facebook designers settled on a solution: evolve their software to actually build the web sites it mocks up, expanding its customer base to include designers and marketers looking to build out a web presence without the help of costly developers. “You design the website in Framer and then at the end you click publish and we turn it into a website that we also host,” Bok explained. Building websites quickly and cheaply has been a winning formula for consumer-facing startups —Nasdaq-listed Wix, SquareSpace, and Wordpress’s owner Automattic, which was valued at over $7.5 billion in a 2021 share buyback . But van Dijk and Bok realized that businesses with more complex needs often need to hire a team to address them or turn to rival website builder startup Webflow. “We discovered a really big juicy problem because traditional web design happens in one tool like Figma, then actual building is done elsewhere,” says Bok. “The fact that they are separate makes for a very inefficient process.” In just under 18 months since the launch of this new product, the Amsterdam-based startup grown revenues fourfold to over $10 million. Now, after raising a $27 million Series C round (the valuation was not disclosed), Framer is attracting attention from Silicon Valley investors, and rivals like Figma, that are watching its no-code publishing tools and growth closely, Forbes has learned. Bok and van Dijk began building Framer in 2015 after selling their Mac app studio Sofa to Facebook in 2011. The pair had relocated back to Amsterdam after a spell in Menlo Park, California, to start a new business focused on solving the problems they faced working on mobile design at Facebook. The goal? Helping designers build “prototypes that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing,” says Bok. Framer’s high fidelity design tool was an early success, attracting a loyal core of designer fans, and big investors like Greylock, Accel and European venture fund Atomico who backed its Series A in 2017 and Series B round in 2018. But then revenues started to dip. “There was some product market fit but … Jorn and Koen saw evidence that the market size on that product was limited,” says Hillary Ball, partner with Atomico. “But with a pivot there are a lot of unknowns.“ But the pivot appears to be paying off so far. Framer now counts Silicon Valley’s favorite email app Superhuman.com, Dutch Twilio rival Messagebird and Bytedance’s Slack rival Lark as clients. “We could see immediate traction because it solved a real problem for them, and allowed people to build websites much faster,” says van Dijk. Now equipped with fresh cash from its Series C, led by Meritech Capital with existing investors including Atomico and Accell participating, Bok and van Dijk have their eyes set on international expansion. They plan to build widgets to support larger customers and add AI-powered website translations. “Companies do not want to use expensive developer resources to design, manage and host websites and Framer gives you the power to do that with your own design and marketing team,” says Alex Clayton, general partner of Meritech. Framer has a rough road ahead as it goes head to head with some established American rivals. Webflow (which is also backed by Accel and Meritech) scored its own Series C round in March 2022 but with revenues of $100 million and a $4 billion valuation . Then there’s Adobe, which forecasted revenues of $400 million in 2022 for Figma when it announced plans for a $20 billion takeover of the collaborative design startup in September last year. Bok and van Dijk don’t seem daunted to challenge two well-funded rivals at the same time. “Putting together the designing and building of websites will change how they are built,” says van Dijk. ”This is how all websites will be built in the future and that’s what’s driving our success here.” MORE FROM FORBES