Backed by $7M, Webydo's Rapidly Growing 93K Designer Community Challenges Adobe

NEW YORK, July 7, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Webydo, one of the fastest-growing designer communities in the world, has raised a $7,000,000 game-changing investment for its professional website-creation cloud platform. The investment was led by OurCrowd, among the biggest equity-based crowdfunding VCs; Magna Ventures affiliate from Spain; and a group of strategic investors from the US and UK.

Webydo provides a full B2B solution for all the web design needs of 38 million creative designers worldwide. With Webydo, designers can now create, manage, and host innovative pixel-perfect websites, without writing code or hiring developers. Led by a global community of 93,000 designers, design studios, and web design agencies, Webydo enjoys rapid growth, with thousands of new designers joining the platform every week. During Q1-2014 alone, Webydo's community grew by 100%, and according to a recent W3Techs survey, websites produced by the Webydo platform are ranked in the top 3 for highest qualitative traffic.(1)

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"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."

Currently, there are 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.(2)

The vast majority of websites (74%) are created in an expensive and complex professional process, using B2B solutions for developers that depend on manual coding. Adobe, the main provider of software for designers, hasn't provided a full code- free solution for professional website creation either.

Webydo disrupts this market with innovative technology and a unique community model. Using Webydo's powerful cloud software, designers can now 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. Behind the scenes, Webydo's sophisticated code-generator automatically converts designers' static visual design into fully functional HTML5 websites with high- standard, cross-platform W3C-validated code that is constantly updated to the latest industry standards.

In contrast to Adobe, Webydo is led by the designers who use it, and they 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. "We will use the funds we've received to continue developing more innovative features, as well as tools for community leadership. Fortified with the $7,000,000 Series B investment, Webydo's designer community is ready to conquer the web design market."

About Webydo. Webydo 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 – designing, managing, and hosting advanced pixel-perfect websites for their clients, with parallax scrolling animation, e-commerce, a friendly built- in CMS, SEO management tools, and even a client billing system.

For more information visit www.webydo.com, or contact us at [email protected].

Webydo can be found on Behance, Twitter, and Facebook.

(1) See W3Techs' recent survey.

(2) See Webydo's recent market analysis, accompanied by an enlightening infographic made in partnership with Visual.ly.

SOURCE Webydo