InVision, valued at $1.9B, picks up $115M Series F

https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/11/invision-valued-at-1-9-billion-picks-up-115-million-series-f/

by kaboro • 8 years ago

97 86 8 years ago

$100M ARR and fully remote!

warent2• 8 years ago

This is definitely worth highlighting. Why so many businesses are still deluding themselves into thinking that work is better done when cramming people into an office is beyond me. Remote work is still the minority. My hypothesis is that it's actually just covert ego/power/distrust at play because founders and executives like to be able to say they have an office, and they like to see their employees "working." This mostly only applies to "new" businesses though (i.e. founded in the last 5-10 years); older businesses have an excuse because they're just doing what they already know.

In any case, huge respect to InVision for being one of the leaders in advocating remote work.

l4u532• 8 years ago

I, for one, work non-remote because of the social factor. Being among people physically is awesome (for me). And there’s surely a lot of founders who prefer building up a company with an on-site social environment. A co-working space does not count, because of the lack of continuity with your surrounding peers (ie. no common projects that lead to ‘being together’), hence its much harder to establish long-term relationships.

anongraddebt• 8 years ago

Is there a company, equivalent (or larger) in size to InVision, that is an example of a remote work org.? $100M ARR isn't anything to scoff at, but I'm not sure InVision's success (so far) puts the nail in the coffin to the idea of a non-remote work org.

I'm young and still find it invaluable to be able to walk over to Jane in engineering or Bob in marketing to hash things out in-person.

InGodsName2• 8 years ago

Is inVision Opensource? How do they prevent source code leak if everyone works remotely?

bpicolo• 8 years ago

Remote or not, you typically have to trust employees to not leak your source. Most SaaS companies don't have an issue with employees trying to sell trade secrets to competitors, so they don't need strict controls.

Code exfiltration for trusted employees is as easy as an SCP, an email, whatever. Very few companies have extreme controls around these sorts of thing.

That said, typically remote-only companies will send you a laptop specifically for work that they have control over.

devmunchies• 8 years ago

both InVision and plaid announced funding today from spark and Goldman sachs. Thats a lot of cash.

CameronBanga• 8 years ago

In my 9 years of making mobile apps, I've never hated a tool more than I've hated InVision. But congrats to the team on this pick up I suppose.

shishy• 8 years ago

What do you hate about it? I've had a good and seamless experience with their software.

hn_throwaway_992• 8 years ago

As a general rule, these kinds of comments are not helpful and don't add to the discussion in any way. As the other respondent said, if you don't like the product, please let us know why! I've used InVision and have always liked it, but I've really only used it from a "designers sent me an InVision deck to build", so I'm genuinely interested in how other stakeholders may find problems with it.

psweber• 8 years ago

I get why this was down-voted to the bottom, but I COMPLETELY agree with this person.

InVision seems to me to be a company without a vision. I think their tools are only useful for prototyping things that are so simplistic that they don't require a prototype. I know art directors that like it for sharing visual designs with clients. I despise it for prototyping complicated applications. The workflow is disjointed, confusing, and under-powered.

drewrv2• 8 years ago

Invision must dogfood their own ui design tools, right? The thought of trying to mock up ui changes to their app within their app cracks me up.

Waterluvian• 8 years ago

I've often thought about how tricky/silly it must be to work in some domains using tools of other domains.

For example, I work with cartographic data and the darn mathies and programmers stole all our words. So I end up performing a map on a Map of maps. Or managing vector of vector layers. Naming is hard but this is ridiculous.

Using mockup tools to make mockup tools probably has its own set of ridiculous collisions.

hn_throwaway_992• 8 years ago

It just looks like a remote desktop to localhost so you get one of those "mirrors to infinity" views.

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

I get this daily on meetings, when someone screenshares Hangouts viewing their screen.

travisjungroth• 8 years ago

This is probably a joke, but you can avoid this by having a pretend application for your mockups instead of the real one. So it would go InVision app > InVision mockup > pretend app.

d0m• 8 years ago

I think most great products have that recursive iterative cycle.

joejerryronnie• 8 years ago

My favorite recursive entity is the Stanford Academic Senate’s Committee on Committees. I imagine the inaugural meeting, called to order some time in 1957, is still ongoing to this day.

Umofomia• 8 years ago

It's not too different from having a C compiler written in C. Once you bootstrap[1] the first version, you can create subsequent versions from the first one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_%28compilers%29

drewrv2• 8 years ago

Sure I get that. It's just visually I know that when I'm taking screenshots of app windows, and I have said windows open, I confuse myself sometimes. If I were trying to mockup a mockup app I'd want to use a different, visually distinct, tool.

mehblahwhatevs• 8 years ago

Yea but be careful, I checked out coffeescript years ago (technically a "transpile" to JS). I changed the language then built a new compiler with it.

However I apparently added some error in the language and the compiler was then broken, so I couldn't make my fix and re-transpile without checking out a clean version of the repo :D

reneherse2• 8 years ago

Random question for anyone who uses InVision, as we're considering making it central to our process. Is it easy for frontend devs to recreate the designers' prototype in code? What pitfalls should we look out for?

ixtli2• 8 years ago

Well currently their main application is inaccessible, so you have the issue of downtime making it impossible to see anything you've made. Collaboration is cool but even mature applications like GitHub have downtime sometimes that seriously interrupts operations at downstream companies. Always consider this before relying on a service for something core to the business.

etimberg2• 8 years ago

If the designs are uploaded correctly, you can see CSS snippets for different UI elements. Definitely helps to recreate it faster.

porker• 8 years ago

Then none of the ones I've worked on have been uploaded correctly. They were always static PNGs of the design.

Now I start to understand why people like InVision! I've always preferred Avocode

jdhn3• 8 years ago

Kind of. My workflow is whiteboarding to Sketch to Invision, and you have to manually select assets for export in Sketch in order for it to show up in Invision. However, this is only or elements such as icons. For elements such as text, you can simply click on it in Inspect mode to view the font family, style, etc. You can also toggle whether you want to view the code in CSS, LESS, SASS, etc.

jbob20002• 8 years ago

Is it easy for frontend devs to recreate the designers' prototype in code?

No. The designers have to build the designs in a very particular way in order to get anything useful from invision. Good luck telling your design team that the way they build their sketch files is all wrong.

I have used invision professionally for 2 years now, it is a glorified screenshot host. It's biggest pitfall is that you have to use it in a very particular way, otherwise it's totally useless.

daleco3• 8 years ago

From UX perspective, it's one of the best tools for managing the design process. 1-click to update / push mockups from Sketch. Ability to do light interactive mockups, commenting, and CSS specs.

We've been testing most of the tools on the market (Zeplin, UX Pin, Avocode...). InvisionApp beat all of them.

comis• 8 years ago

Invision is only okay. It's bloated and sluggish with a cramped UI. I think Zeplin and Avocode are both superior products. And that's just if you are required to use Sketch - if you have the freedom to make the swap to Figma you should just do that imo.

dharma12• 8 years ago

Invision is great for quick clickthroughs, and commenting on specific parts of designs. But for handover of Sketch designs, I think Figma works the best - it's cross platform and opens Sketch files well.

InGodsName2• 8 years ago

Hey UI/UX experts, I am wondering how should you go about mastering UI/UX of mobile app/web app.

I've a girlfriend who wants to start in this area but is pretty clueless. Can anyone please provide a path to follow?

Is this good:

1. Learn UI design in Paint.net/MS Paint

2. Read book on color theory, typography, whitespace

3. Design in dragdrop software like photoshop/illustrator

4. Learn CSS and recreate your design in CSS.

5. Lean some JavaScript for animation and visualization/charts etc...

Is this a decent path? What software tools/books do you recommend for a new self learning student?

aklemm• 8 years ago

She could probably do #1 on paper or in step #3. I'm using Figma in step #3 recently and like it a lot. Step #2 is critical and ongoing and would be a much longer list of books, I'd think.

escaper• 8 years ago

100% not MS Paint or Paint.net...

Tell her to download Adobe XD, it's free right now and that's the standard in the industry.

#3, I wouldn't call that dragdrop but at this point, it'd make more sense for her to learn a vector program for the things that Adobe XD can't do. That would require Illustrator and would be a better use of her time.

For #4 you will have to have a good understanding of HTML to be able to do anything with CSS- that has to be the foundation before she learns CSS.

talldan• 8 years ago

There isn't really a standard at the moment in my opinion, though from personal experience Sketch + InVision are the most commonly used. Figma is picking up a lot of interest. I've never seen a UI designer use Adobe XD.

Skills learnt in one tool should be fairly transferable, so it doesn't matter too much. Just don't use photoshop.

lesss365• 8 years ago

Would suggest learning some usability as well. Don't Make Me Think is a good one. Also, read up on Nielsen Group's publications

whytaka• 8 years ago

My advice is to skip 1 and 2.

She should learn Photoshop/Illustrator (or equivalent software) and recreate famous interfaces. (Facebook, Google Docs, Gmail, etc.) If she can get them to be pixel perfect, she has enough technical skill and can start exploring.

She should work on industry tools right away. She should skip theory - she'll learn more from doing. She can go back to theory if she feels like she's missing something.

Vanderson• 8 years ago

I'd actually advise #2, but I'd do it at the same time as the others. Why? Because I did a lot of design classes and studying and I really, really wish I had taken typography.

The designers that works with fonts well make the nicest and most pleasing designs. Just copying others will ensure you can copy well. Understanding the theory behind those designs will allow you to make anything you want, and do it well.

jdhn3• 8 years ago

1. Don't use anything Microsoft, use Figma or XD. Figma is free for individuals, and XD is part of Creative Cloud.

2. This is a good start, but if she wants to get into UX she should start by reading articles at Neilsen Norman[0], UX Planet[1], or Interaction Design

3. See #1, although frankly it pays to do wireframes on paper before even touching a mouse/trackpad.

4. I would say at this point that HTML/CSS is a "nice to have" skill. I believe that Figma now contains a basic interaction design suite (i.e. tap, swipe, scroll) that lets you go between different screens.

5. I'd say to stick with learning how/when different charts should be used rather than trying to jump into something like HighCharts or D3.

[0] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/

[1] https://uxplanet.org/

[2] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature

mesh• 8 years ago

XD is also free.

daleco3• 8 years ago

There are two aspects, the tools and the knowledge. What people recommend above will just teach UI (How to build), but not UX (why to build it this way and how to approach the problem).

For the tools, it's like in software engineering, you need pick the your "stack" (which wil depends on the goals and deliverable). Do NOT use Paint / Photoshop to build mockups, you will waste your time and hate your job. Get a Sketch License, find a good tutorial online (Udemy and co).

To master the field, study the fundamentals: cognitive sciences, human factors, cognitive ergonomics and design patterns, the goal is to understand how the brain works, perception, memory, decision making, limits...

Basic computer science is going to give an edge.

Basic knowledge in experiment design will be necessary to test your design with rigor (UX Researcher).

VladimirGolovin• 8 years ago

1. Jump straight to Figma.

2. Yes, and also grids and Google's Material Design. The MD spec is the most coherent document on a design language I have ever read. While it's not necessary to follow it to the letter, studying it would be definitely helpful.

3. Figma is better (and free for a single user).

edmundo• 8 years ago

I'd say skip step 1, there is lots of cheap and better UI design tools out there (see Sketch, Figma, et al), and they are very easy to learn.

Start by trying to replicate UI designs in the wild, it is incredible helpful! It helps you develop your taste and understanding of relationship between different elements, spacing, layout, grids… soon enough you start to see patterns emerge, which you can use when working on your own designs.

Focus on learning typography: it’s no secret that UI is mostly typography, if you get it right that is the job! Get a good book such as “The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst – although is focused on print design, the core principles are transferable to digital.

Hope that helps!

ixtli2• 8 years ago

Their main application is down right now. Bad timing, I guess. (https://status.invisionapp.com/)

tenryuu• 8 years ago

I've used invision multiple times for university courses. It's really great how they made an extension to photoshop to render out artboards to generate the screens. My support experience is also quite pleasant. Even just with a single free prototype, it takes a lot of hassle out of making interactive demos when I'm exporting straight out of what is essentially mockup material

EGreg2• 8 years ago

What makes Invision - a mockup app - worth THAT MUCH??

mattnewton• 8 years ago

From the article, sounds like good old fashioned customers who need a mock-up app and are willing to pay.

EGreg2• 8 years ago

Seems like it. But that’s amazing. We use it. 5 million people pay for it, monthly. Good job!!

NorthOf33rd• 8 years ago

That's still an absurdly high multiple of ARR.

jdhn3• 8 years ago

If I were Invision, I would either invest in or buy out Figma, and have it replace Invision Studio. Figma is on the up and up, and from what I heard Invision Studio looked good, but the execution was poor.

pixelpp• 8 years ago

Yep, it is a fat client with lousy performance. They tried to build Sketch + Principle in the same tool. Both those tools are super complicated software products. They should have created separate tools which complement each other.

mortenjorck• 8 years ago

Worse, they tried to accomplish this not with a Cocoa app (as Sketch and I believe Principle are), but in a heavy Electron app.

[edit] Sorry, I typed "Figma" for some reason when I meant to type "Principle."

seanalltogether• 8 years ago

Our development agency has switched completely to Figma. As a developer there are only a couple things I like about it better (invision completely breaks the back button), but the biggest gains seem to come from our designers as well as the collaboration its enabled with clients.

cercatrova4• 8 years ago

Oh God no, I don't want a slow entity like InVision hampering the progress of one of the best design tools on the market, Figma.

JPWH• 8 years ago

I'm curious, what reasons would lead a company with $100M ARR to seek a funding round for close to their ARR? Are there no other avenues for securing capital that are close to you ARR?

lojack• 8 years ago

There might be, but I think the real question should be closer to: "Are there no other avenues for securing capital that are close to your ARR with costs as low as you'd get during a new funding round?"

I don't have an answer to your question, but access to cheap capital is just one reason why you may want to fundraise when the money isn't necessary.

tguedes• 8 years ago

Probably cheap capital in case the markets turn down. It's expected that the venture capital money will dry up a bit and the fed raising interest rates means that taking loans will be more expensive. I've seen a lot of VCs say if you can take it now, take it.

misiti3780• 8 years ago

I know this will sound trite, but this is NOT a startup, and I dont know why the editors techcrunch cant seem to figure that out.

nVision, the startup looking to be the Salesforce of design, has officially achieved unicorn status with the close of a $115 million Series F round,

You are no longer a startup when you are on series F

yread• 8 years ago

How do you define a startup? I thought it's usually defined as a company that's more focused on growth than profit and return to shareholders. That would not limit the number of funding rounds

treve• 8 years ago

Before the start-up hype I think in the Netherlands you need to be in business for 3 years to no longer be considered one. But that definition has shifted quite a bit there too.

The company you describe I would describe as any typical corporation. In my head I still see start-ups as a scrappy, small team in a fairly young business.

The dictionary definition says:

1 : the act or an instance of setting in operation or motion 2 : a fledgling business enterprise

Both of these definitions suggest it really just describes 'new' ventures.

a13n• 8 years ago

Sure it is, they're still raising venture capital, and they haven't exited yet. It's a startup, just in its later stages.

nf__853• 8 years ago

As someone who uses InVision daily, I have become more and more frustrated with the experience.

Building a large project feels like building a house of cards. I often run into small but infuriating UX issues inside their app. One example of this is uploading artboards from Sketch using the InVision Craft plugin. Uploading a new artboard that has the same name as a previously uploaded artboard overwrites the original without asking or telling you what happened. I spent way to long trying to figure out why one of my artboards wasn't uploading, and then it took me even longer to figure out where it ended up once I realized the problem. When you have hundreds of screens in a project every upload from Craft starts to feel scary.

These little interactions are all over the app and the amount of frustration they cause becomes exponential over time, like a repetitive strain injury.

I've been an InVision user for a long time and it seems to me that the core features have not improved, but have actually degraded over time. I assume because they put all their resources into Studio.

I hope they use some of this money to improve their core offering. Sketch users aren't going away and I think it would be wise to try and keep as many of them as possible using InVision.

felideon• 8 years ago

I've seen the same sentiment from other InVision users, including myself. It seems like they spread themselves too thin when they started working on InVision studio. Almost to the point where I wonder how much usability testing they actually do these days on their core product. Which is ironic coming from a company whose whole point of existence is to facilitate that sort of thing.

I was giving them the benefit of doubt for a while and waiting for them to get their act together. But all hope was lost when I got their last survey where they had me categorize a boat load of features into four buckets: must haves, should haves, nice to haves, and I think shouldn't haves. I think I categorized 90% of the features into nice-to-haves, and the rest in should haves. Of course, there was no "don't know, don't care" bucket. And not one of the "features" was "improve the existing user experience".

So I feel like they are falling into the usual trap of piling on features to the product, and they are not listening to their existing users to improve the current (core) product.

But I get it, one must feed the beast in order to raise $115M.

dharma12• 8 years ago

I think it's a pretty good product, and has grown fast (hence the valuation) but they really need to improve the core product. It's got too many bugs and feels like it's had zero effort in the past 1-2 years.

Sketch and Figma now have very similar clickthrough prototyping tools built in, and it's probably a question of time until they catch up.

cityzen2• 8 years ago

Wow, I had no idea sketch added prototyping. Since I only use it when I'm not writing code I don't really keep up with the features but... wow! Thanks for the tip!

nf__853• 8 years ago

Agree about the sketch and Figma click through stuff. One of the only things I see holding all of the competitors back from eating InVisions lunch right is that it's easier to share and collaborate (internally and externally) with InVision. Being able to login, comment, and share a URL seems to be a big part of it.

I would also say the inspect feature is a big plus, but that doesn't even play nicely with some sketch plugins right now.

cityzen2• 8 years ago

Have you heard of/tried Marvel App? (marvelapp.com) I tried InVision but the syncing between sketch and Invision was so laggy I couldn't deal with it. I found Marvel and have been happily giving them my money ever since. Granted I am not really a "designer" so I'm not in it every day but I really like how easy it is to sync and it's pretty well integrated into Sketch: http://cloud.cityzen.com/2281d62e5564

You can see there that the Sync buttons for Marvel sit right on top of the list of artboards. Pricing is on point as well.

nf__853• 8 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion, I have heard of Marvel and tried it a while back but haven't given it a fair second chance. I will give it a shot!

AndrewConn• 8 years ago

I echo the sentiment. I’ll add my experience... Using InVision at a large company is a nightmare. It’s slow, buggy. You can’t trust it. It’s failed on me so many times I can’t count anymore.

Kluny• 8 years ago

"Chrome has quit unexpectedly. Do you want to send a crash report?"

zackmorris• 8 years ago

Can someone please create Series as a Service (SaaS) to facilitate connecting startups with funding?

InVision is cool and everything, but these funding rounds are on the order of 1000 times larger than what a couple of indie devs need to create similar functionality. I would like to live on a beach, or in a cabin in the woods (preferably both, seasonally) and create software remotely. I also need to be left alone for a year so I can create the next-gen tools in the spirit of Firebase, Elixir etc so I can focus on the work instead of the minutia/infrastructure surrounding it.

Unfortunately after writing this, I realized it's all about the customer base so never mind. Actually, can someone create Customer Base as a Service (CBaaS) to facilitate connecting startups with customers?

tschwimmer• 8 years ago

It's not just about the product, it's about tons of other things. Especially for a design centric company like InVision, the money is used to hire brand marketers, salespeople, staff out support functions, and build a global distribution engine.

For these late rounds, it's not just about building out the product like Seed/A. These are "win the market" investments that give companies a war chest to go compete or carve out a market niche.

avinium• 8 years ago

Unfortunately after writing this, I realized it's all about the customer base so never mind. Actually, can someone create Customer Base as a Service (CBaaS) to facilitate connecting startups with customers?

Someone did. It's called Google, and businesses pay through the nose for a chance to reach customers through it :)

cercatrova4• 8 years ago

There are a few VCs that handle indie businesses, such as www.indie.vc, www.earnestcapital.com, etc.

artur_makly• 8 years ago

Not bad for a 100% all-remote team. We use it daily. Only wish their main app had an API. Kudos!

thrownaway954• 8 years ago

Congrats to them!!! The founders have been nothing but awesome people through the years (especially in the ColdFusion community), even before finding InVision. Glad to see they are succeeding!

ux-app• 8 years ago

sorry for inserting my own product into the conversation, but I am running out of ways to understand the failure of my product.

I wrote a prototyping application (https://www.ux-app.com/dev/editor). It's on life support at the moment and brings in only a couple hundred $ per month.

I think it's a lot more powerful than inVision and many of the other successful tools. If you have time then add a mobile table view to see how powerful the editor is.

Why is it failing so hard? Any ideas?

Thanks, Eli

reneherse2• 8 years ago

I would jump over to the Indie Hackers site and ask for feedback there. I'm sure it will spark a useful conversation.

From my quick survey of your marketing site, there's a lot of work that needs to be done to improve the UX on mobile. I would suggest working with a designer to improve the graphics and checking that the layout works on different browsers/OSes/breakpoints. Might be easiest just to start over with a premade template for the marketing site.

pier25• 8 years ago

I think your marketing website is weak. It doesn't look as if it was targeted to designers, who I assume is your target audience.

InVision, valued at $1.9B, picks up $115M Series F

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