Authored by Mark Hefflinger on April 29, 2011 - 6:27am.
San Francisco - 99designs, the developer of an online marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design, said on Thursday it has raised $35 million in its first round of funding, led by Accel Partners.
Angel investors Michael Dearing (eBay, Harrison Metal), Dave Goldberg (Survey Monkey), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr, Tiny Speck) and Anthony Casalena (Squarespace) also participated.
San Francisco-based 99designs was founded in Australia in 2008, when co-founders Mark Harbottle and Matt Mickiewicz -- the entrepreneurs behind sitepoint.com, Flippa.com and Learnable.com -- spun it out of the SitePointForums.
The company, which has 26 employees, said it will use the capital for international expansion, platform development, community initiatives like design scholarships and aggressive hiring in both San Francisco and Melbourne.
"Most importantly, this investment goes a long way towards guaranteeing that we will be around long term," wrote Harbottle in the company's blog.
99designs said it currently has over 100,000 designers in 192 countries, and has paid out over $19 million to designers to date.
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