Creative Fabrica, an Amsterdam-based social network for designers and craftspeople, raised $61 million in expansion funding, with French VC Alven serving as the lead investor.
Additionally, UK-based VC TriplePoint and LionTree participated in the round. Additionally, participating investors included US-based FJ Labs, London-based VC Felix Capital, and Dutch VC Peak Capital.
The funding will be utilized for both current and new creator verticals, as well as for increasing the platform’s designer network, creative generative AI toolkit, and staff with senior talent globally. With the most recent round, $70M has been raised in total.
“It’s been quite a rollercoaster going from 30 individuals to our great team of 160 presently,” says CEO Roemie Hillenaar. There is no time to squander because we have so much to develop for our community. With this new round, we can move more quickly while still providing resources and inspiration to the 100 million+ creators worldwide.
In 2016, Anca Stefan and Roemie Hillenaar started Creative Fabrica. Although it started as a market for digital goods, it has evolved into a larger ecosystem for producers and creatives.
The platform provides a font and visual asset collection with a subscription-based premium content model. The portal provides creative tools, classes, and inspirational content in addition to paid content that is geared to its wide audience.
The company’s target market can access a variety of craft verticals, from more popular ones like embroidery design, home crafts, and quilting to more specialized ones like print-on-demand and logos.
The business recently released CF Spark, a set of tools that employ generative AI to help designers and producers accelerate their creative processes by enabling them to generate content through text-to-image.
According to the company, consumers have generated over 15 million photos using Spark in the last three months, a significant rise over its designer library’s 7 million goods.
4 million people currently use Creative Fabrica, which last month alone saw sales from 175 nations. The US accounts for more than 65% of Creative Fabrica’s revenue, with another 15% coming from the UK, Canada, and Australia.
According to Hillenaar, 4 million clients were using these assets half a year ago, while 50.000 designers were selling them. We were able to immediately incorporate these technologies into our product and ecosystem thanks to our partnerships with companies like StableDiffusion and OpenAI.
Hillenaar continues, “We converted our 4 million clients into designers overnight, enabling them to instantly create anything they desire without the requirement for prior design knowledge.”
According to Thomas Cuvelier, Partner at Alven, “the Creative Fabrica platform is one of those ecosystems where generative AI has a clear use case and offers enormous value at scale,” with a fast-growing user base in the millions.
Thomas continued, “When it comes to things that would be difficult or take too much time for humans to develop, AI-generated content is a fantastic method to fill in the blanks in people’s minds. Roemie and Anca, the company’s founders, were among the first to recognize the potential of this technology while steadily constructing a market-leading business.
“The advances made by Creative Fabrica since our initial investment in their Series A strengthen our conviction in the team’s qualities,” says Frederic Court, the founder of Felix Capital, “vision, creativity, and love for the global creative community.” The team’s genuine approach and dedication to the value of self-expression, which has been proved via their successes over the past year, put them in a strong position to seize possibilities, like their established early leadership in generative AI.”
“We are delighted to continue our support of Creative Fabrica and the network of creators they have developed as they push this goal globally,” Frederic said. “As investors focus on the convergence of technology, creativity, and culture.
Image Credit: Creative Fabrica
