Crayon, a new search engine for discovering different types of marketing design that launched in November, has just closed a $1.5 million angel round from a number of top investors in Boston, New York and San Francisco. Among those taking part in the round were HubSpot founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan, HubSpot CMO Mike Volpe, Adelphic Mobile co-founder Jennifer Lum, MIT tech and entrepreneurship professor Ed Roberts, Moat co-founder and CEO Jonah Goodheart, well-known author/entrepreneur Eric Ries and Mixer Labs founder Othman Laraki. CommonAngels Ventures and Boston Syndicates are backing the startup, as well. Meanwhile, Volpe and Ries — author of "The Lean Startup" — have been acting as advisors for Crayon.
“We’re excited to partner with Jonah and John to support their vision of a new, innovative platform that defines an innovative space in marketing services,” said James Geshwiler, managing director of CommonAngels Ventures, in an email.
Founded by former HubSpot VP Jonah Lopin (who was the company’s 6th employee) and former Admob product manager John Osborne—both MIT Sloan alums—the startup aims to inspire marketers on whatever they are building, as well as help them stay on top of the latest trends. Marketers and agencies can search the more than 13 million designs featured on Crayon by keyword, or browse categories such as traffic level, industry or content management system. Marketers can also build collections of marketing designs and work. There’s a collaborative element, too: Users are able to build shareable collections, allowing team members, partners and customers to vote on designs or post comments about them. The company’s goal is to reach 100 million designs by the end of 2015, and Lopin said in an email he believes they can beat that “by a healthy margin.”
"We have capacity to add over 500,000 new designs every day, and we're just warming up," said Osborne, who serves as Crayon's CTO, in a press release.
Lopin told me that there are currently tens of thousands of users, with more signing up every day.
"Crayon provides a delightful solution to a problem most marketers have, which is how to come up with great ideas," Volpe said. "Testing and iteration are core to inbound marketing success, and Crayon helps marketers look outside their regular field of vision to find non-obvious insights that help them get better results."
The funding, Lopin told me, "is all about building a world-class engineering and product team. We're 1% of the way done with our product vision, and the funding is all about building a remarkable product as quickly as we can.”
Currently, Crayon is hiring for multiple roles, including a full-stack developer and a front-end coder.
All images via Crayon.
