Growing The Speckle Seed
Raising a seed round is much more than just the money: it's the people that matter, as their experience and passion for open source are key to Speckle's success!
Written by Dimitrie Stefanescu on
I am proud to announce that we've just raised a $5.5M (£4M) seed round. For us, this step was much more than just raising money: it was about finding the right partners with the right mindsets to help us push forward our vision of democratizing the world of 3D data with open source.
In the end, we couldn't be happier with the mix: the round was led by led by Frontline Ventures and Matrix Partners. Existing investors Foundamental joined the round too together with Cocoa and angel investors, including the Co-founders of Sentry (David Cramer and Chris Jennings), Built Technologies (Chase Gilbert), Plangrid (Ralph Gootee), and executives from Snap (Patric Mandia and Edward Koai) and Stripe (Guillaume Princen).
Ron Miller
What are we planning to do next? Our community has been growing a lot, and we're planning to give it our full attention - with all the love and care that entails. Moreover, there are more feature requests than we can count - so we will double down on developing Speckle as an equitable open source platform for 3D data that serves your needs!
Looking back, we've come a long way since I wrote the first line of Speckle code. Speckle started out as a playful Grasshopper plugin enabling easy sharing of 3D models. Throughout my PhD, it evolved into an exciting open source project that captivated the AEC industry, and, most importantly, Matteo - the best contributor and cofounder one could ask for 🤘
Together, we took the plunge and established a distributed company around Speckle in 2020, just as the first wave of the pandemic hit. Somehow we also managed to raise a smaller pre-seed round, even though we didn't really know what we were doing (but, somehow, Foundamental believed in us and our OSS-driven product anyway).
Since then, we've grown fast: thanks to our team’s dedication and hard work, we've built an amazing community around Speckle and we’re seeing impressive growth across the board. We've released 10+ new connectors and pushed out amazing features to our web app, while continuously polishing and improving our core SDKs.
Our whole world - from buildings to planes - is being built from 3D models carefully articulated and thought through by architects, designers and engineers. Just like software engineering projects, people collaborate to create things greater than the sum of their parts.
Unlike building software, the world of 3D lacks the essential infrastructure to communicate and work together. This is what we’re solving for, and we can’t wait to open up a new digital era for how the world - and every object in it - is designed and built.
Want to be part of the journey? We’re hiring across a number of roles - we're a bunch of friendly nerds on a mission - so drop us a line!
Feeback or comments? We'd love to hear from you in our community forum!
