Hillary Ball, Partner, Atomico

Over a decade ago, all personal websites were built in HTML, which meant it was a relatively time-consuming endeavour that required developer support. Then came visual website builders, like Wix and Squarespace, with easy-to-use and templated solutions which made it possible for anyone to build a website without knowing code. Now, almost all personal websites are built with these visual builders, which has opened up website building for mass consumers.

For the same shift from code to visual builders to take place for professional websites, it requires a visual builder that can handle the complexity of professional websites, while also still delivering the design-flexibility that the best designers demand. Framer has built this platform: a fully flexible visual design canvas, with all the product depth, high control, and features that a scaling company needs, from a powerful CMS, to A/B testing, to enterprise security and beyond. With Framer, a designer can ship a full-scale production website, with no developer resourcing required.

This is enabling Framer to usher in a market shift worth tens of billions of dollars where professional websites can now be built with a visual builder. This makes it easier, faster, and less expensive to ship & host your company’s beautifully designed website. Global leading companies today, such as Miro, Perplexity, Mollie, and Bird, are customers who use Framer as the fastest way for them to design, publish and scale their entire website presence.

Building a platform with this level of capability has been made possible by remarkable product velocity at Framer. The team is always shipping – new features, higher performance, and new ways for creators on Framer to earn, which also let users build faster. This has made it stand apart in the broader competitive landscape as the website builder that is truly loved by designers, while being capable of supporting complex enterprise use cases.

Today, Framer is powerful enough to support websites and companies of any size. Framer is also uniquely positioned to continue to capitalise on the AI opportunity for professional use cases – making professional generated sites work, with brand guidelines, enterprise-grade collaboration and continuous optimisation.

Atomico first partnered with Framer in 2018, when we led the company’s Series B round. Co-founders Koen and Jorn have deep backgrounds in product design, sold their first company to Facebook in 2011, and have worked together for the past two decades. Seeing Koen and Jorn work for the past 7 years has been a remarkable example of a founding team that is able to combine vision with relentless execution. There are a number of exceptional qualities about this team, but there are a few that have continued to stand out to us over the years:

1. Talent magnets: Koen & Jorn have attracted ambitious talent into the team and built a culture of high agency that has enabled them to achieve remarkable scale with high efficiency. People who work at Framer have high standards and they get things done. The majority of the executive team at Framer has been there for over 6 years, growing with the company through a pivot journey. Everyone in the team deeply understands their product and customer.
2. Product velocity: The team is always shipping. This is fueled by a deeply ingrained designer community they have fostered and built feedback loops with, which informs the product direction. They have maintained an unparalleled pace of product velocity that keeps the product always at the cutting-edge, and makes Framer the platform that designers are proud to bring to their teams.
3. A team that skates where the puck is going: Based on their own deep experiences in product design, and the close engagement that they have built with the design community, the team knows how to build for the future of design. They see a few moves ahead of everyone else in terms of how a new technology or feature will shift designers’ needs or create new workflows, and they build for that, and they have a product velocity that enables them to do it successfully.

All of these qualities have enabled the Framer team to reach their incredible scale today and are the qualities that are going to continue to propel them into this next phase as the category winner for companies to design and run their websites.

We could not be more thrilled to be doubling down on our partnership with Framer by co-leading the company’s $100m Series D round at a $2 billion valuation alongside Meritech, and for all that’s still ahead for Framer.