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Watch out Adobe! A duo of Israeli entrepreneurs is right behind you.
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Webydo is one of the fastest growing designer communities in the world and has raised $7 million in investment for its website-creation cloud platform. The investment was led by OurCrowd, an equity-based crowdfunding VC, Magna Ventures affiliate from Spain, and a group of strategic investors from the US and UK.
The company is a community-led cloud platform for professional web design with over 93, 000 designers, design studios, and web design agencies worldwide. Webydo’s sophisticated cloud software allows creative designers to bring any web design to life without writing code. Using Webydo’s full B2B solution, designers enjoy total control over the whole process.
Webydo provides a full B2B solution for all the web design needs of 38 million creative designers worldwide. With it, designers can create, manage, and host innovative pixel-perfect websites, without writing code or hiring developers. The company enjoys rapid growth, with thousands of new designers joining its platform every week.
During the first quarter of 2014 alone, Webydo’s community grew by 100%, and, according to a recent W3Techs survey, websites produced by its platform are ranked in the top 3 for highest qualitative traffic.
“Developers have dominated the $20.1 billion web design market since the ‘90s, traditionally earning twice designers’ salary, ” says Shmulik Grizim, Webydo’s CEO. “Adobe and the other providers of B2B tools for website creation have sustained this dependency on manual coding that costs up to 70% of website creation budgets and marginalizes designers. Now designers are uniting in order to shape the future of the web on their own, gaining full creative and financial control. Webydo’s goal is to quickly grow into the largest designers’ community in the world and to revolutionize the way websites are created, transforming the web into a richer and more creative human experience.”
There are currently close to 1 billion websites. In January 2014 alone, more than 58 million new sites were added, and yet close to half of the SMBs in the US and EU do not yet have a website. Until recently, the market offered only two kinds of solutions for website creation: B2B solutions for developers (such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal) that depend on manual coding, and code-free B2C solutions for amateurs (such as Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly). However, fewer than 3% of websites are created by amateurs using these simple do-it-yourself B2C platforms.
The majority of websites (74%) are created in an expensive and complex professional process, using B2B solutions for developers that depend on manual coding. Webydo maintains that Adobe, the main provider of software for designers, has not provided a full code free solution for professional website creation.
Webydo claims to disrupt this market with innovative technology and a unique community model. The company says that its cloud software lets designers create pixel perfect websites without writing even one line of code, enjoying the same creative freedom and independence they have when designing for print with Adobe’s Photoshop or Indesign.
The company contrasts its services and products from those offered by Adobe which currently dominates the market by pointing out that they are led by the designers who use it and who vote on which features should be developed first in a radically democratic process.
“Following our community requests, we have just released new cutting-edge features that are transforming the web as a creative medium, such as a Code-Free Parallax Scrolling Animator and a Pixel-Perfect Responsive Editor, ” says Grizim.
He says that the company will use the new funds to continue in the development of new and innovative features.
Webydo was founded in 2010 by Shmulik Grizim and Tzvika Steinmetz. Both are graduates of Israel’s Bar Ilan University and co-founded the firms CD-Tech, and Optiwise.
