Creative Fabrica, an Amsterdam-based social platform for crafters and designers, has raised $61M in growth capital led by French VC Alven (also backed MyTraffic). It was also joined by LionTree and UK-based VC TriplePoint. Further, participating investors included Dutch VC Peak, London-based VC Felix Capital (that also backed Agave Games), and US-based FJ Labs.
In addition to expanding the platform’s designer network, expanding creative generative AI toolset, and growing the team with senior talent globally, the funds will be used for existing and new creator verticals. The latest round brings the total amount raised to $70M.
CEO Roemie Hillenaar says, “It’s been quite a ride growing from 30 people to our amazing team of 160 now. We have so much to build for our community that there is no time to waste. With this new round, we have the means to move faster and continue to bring inspiration and resources for the 100M+ creators out there.”
Accelerating global crafting & design market through AI
Anca Stefan and Roemie Hillenaar founded Creative Fabrica in 2016. It began as a marketplace for digital assets, but is now a broader ecosystem for creators and creatives.
The platform offers a subscription-based premium content library of fonts and graphic assets. Besides premium content, the platform offers design tooling, classes, and inspirational content tailored to its diverse audience.
The company’s target audience can access craft verticals, from mainstream (print-on-demand and logos) to more niche verticals such as embroidery design, home crafts, or quilting.
Recently, the company launched CF Spark, a suite of tools that uses generative AI to help creators and designers speed up their creative process by enabling them to generate content through text-to-image.
As per the company’s claims, in the past three months, customers used Spark to generate over 15 million images, a stark increase from its designer library of 7 million products.
Creative Fabrica is already used by 4 million users and achieved sales from 175 countries last month alone. More than 65% of Creative Fabrica’s business comes from the US, and another 15% from the UK, Canada, and Australia.
Hillenaar says, “Half a year ago, we had on one hand 50.000 designers who were selling assets and on the other hand 4 million customers using these assets. Through our partnerships with organizations such as StableDiffusion and OpenAI, we were able to integrate these technologies directly into our product and ecosystem.” Hillenaar adds, “we turned our 4 million customers into designers overnight, empowering them to create whatever they would like to see in seconds without the need of having learned design skills.”
Thomas Cuvelier, Partner at Alven, says “the Creative Fabrica platform, with a fast-growing user base in the millions, is one of those ecosystems where generative AI has a clear use case and adds tremendous value at scale. AI-generated content is a great way to fill gaps in people’s imagination, addressing what would be difficult or overly time-consuming for humans to create. Founders Roemie and Anca have been early to identify the potential of this technology while steadily continuing to build a market-leading company.”
Frederic Court, the founder of Felix Capital, says, “The strides made by Creative Fabrica since our initial investment in their Series A cement our belief in the team’s strengths – vision, innovation, and passion for the creative community worldwide. The team’s authentic approach and commitment to the power of self-expression, proven through their achievements over the past year, leave them well poised to grab hold of opportunities, such as their demonstrated early leadership in generative AI. As investors focus on the intersection of technology, creativity, and culture, we are proud to continue our support of Creative Fabrica and the community of creators they have built as they accelerate this vision globally.”
