InVision raises $55M in Series D funding to make product design collaborative

Collaborative prototyping and design tool InVision has raised a $55M Series D round led by Iconiq Capital, the venture firm known for investing funds for Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, among others. Existing investors Accel Partners and FirstMark Capital also participated in the round.

The cash infusion comes a little less than a year after a $45M Series C. While the startup wasn’t necessarily looking to raise again so soon, co-founder and CEO Clark Valberg explained that they had a great deal of inbound investment interest because of the current excitement around tools that help businesses better collaborate.

While InVision has no specific plans for the new funding, they will continue making strategic acquisitions where appropriate. The company has bought five smaller design tools over the last year, most of which were done as “acquihires”.

Valberg explained that since his company is building a tool for a very specific kind of person to use on a daily basis (designers), the best product managers are founders who also are designers. So instead of unsuccessfully attempt to convert a product manager into a designer, the company has found it more beneficial to hire designers who already have experience building companies and managing projects.

InVision also now has more than two million registered users, and is used by 70 percent of the Fortune 100. This includes high-profile technology companies like Facebook, Apple and Disney.

Valberg explained that in almost all of these organizations the design team are the ones who start the relationship with InVision. But, often times the prototyping tool is quickly adapted by the rest of the organization, even people who aren’t necessarily involved directly in the design process. For example a company’s CFO may use the tool to give feedback on a particular payment flow that previously was only built by developers.

InVision thinks that providing this natural collaboration is just as important as the actual design tools in InVision. He likened the company to an auditorium where different teams are working on projects on stage, but each company has thousands of employees in the audience to watch and give feedback during the design process.

Ultimately, InVision’s goal is to be for product-based communication what Slack is for general corporate communication and Atlasssian or GitHub is for engineering-based communication. And this funding will certainly help them achieve that goal a little bit faster.