Webydo, a free website design platform that takes creatives’ page designs and automatically converts them into HTML code, announced today it had received a $7 million cash infusion to help finance its challenge to Adobe. The cloud-based platform claims it doubled its user base—to 93,000—in this year’s first quarter and has its eyes set on some 38 million designers worldwide.
“Developers have dominated the $20 billion Web design market since the Nineties, traditionally earning twice designers’ salary. Now designers are uniting in order to shape the future of the Web on their own, gaining full creative and financial control,” said Webydo CEO Shmulik Grizim in a press release announcing the financing. OurCrowd, Magna Ventures, and a group of other investors from the U.S. and U.K. provided the funding.
Webydo maintains that close to half of small- and medium-sized businesses in the U.S and the E.U. still operate without websites. It looks to capitalize on the more than 50 million new sites added to the Web each year. Most B2B solutions for Web developers, such as WordPress and Drupal, depend on manual coding. Code-free solutions such as Wix and Squarespace exist, but Webydo claims that just 3% of websites are created by amateurs using these programs.
“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,” Grizim said. “Webydo’s goal is to quickly grow into the largest designers community in the world and to revolutionize the way websites are created.”
Webydo is a community-based system, whose product improvements are dictated by suggestions from its thousands of users. The company’s founders are Web design agency veterans.
