Crayon Raises $1.5M to Accelerate Growth

Marketing inspiration platform offers the most comprehensive collection of designs

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Apr 30, 2015, 12:58 ET

BOSTON, April 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Crayon, the world's largest marketing inspiration platform, announced today that it has closed a $1.5M investment to accelerate growth. Co-founded by CEO Jonah Lopin and CTO John Osborne, Crayon helps marketers execute better projects by offering inspiration from more than 13 million designs.

"Our website is the most critical digital asset we have, because it is the face of our brand online and it drives conversions and revenue growth," said Laura Taylor, VP Acquisition & Experience Design at WordStream. "When we redesigned our website, we leveraged Crayon throughout the design process for inspiration, benchmarking and communicating with our design firm. The ability to filter down to industry, CMS and page types allowed us to instantaneously see thousands of hyper-relevant designs. Crayon was critical in our redesign process, and helped us achieve great results."

"Crayon is a huge benefit for the marketing world. My team of nine uses Crayon on a regular basis to find landing page and other design ideas," said Dan Briscoe, VP of Marketing at HCSS. "Crayon enables us to quickly find great ideas to test, and helps us stay on top of the latest trends in marketing."

The funding comes from leaders in marketing technology in Boston, New York and San Francisco—including Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Mike Volpe, Eric Ries, Ed Roberts, Othman Laraki, Jonah Goodheart, and Jennifer Lum—as well as institutional investors CommonAngels Ventures and Boston Syndicates. Crayon also raised a portion of the funding from AngelList investors.

"We are excited to partner with Jonah and John to support their vision of a new, innovative platform that defines an innovative space in marketing services," commented CommonAngels Ventures Senior Managing Director Maia Heymann. "Jonah and John are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about their mission and we are thrilled to be working with them."

"Marketers spend tens of billions of dollars every year building websites, landing pages, and email campaigns, but there's never been a great way for marketers to get great ideas," said Lopin. "Millions of marketers out there are hungry for a radically better way to get inspired and find the ideas and insights that can help them grow their businesses."

"We have capacity to add over 500,000 new designs every day, and we're just warming up," said Osborne. "We're building a massive-scale system around design curation, discussion and inspiration."

Thousands of marketers use Crayon, with more signing up every day to generate ideas for digital marketing projects, and to collaborate with colleagues, partners and customers around marketing design projects. Marketers can search for specific designs by keyword, or browse categories such as industry, content management system, and traffic level. Marketers can also build collections of marketing designs and work collaboratively with their team to vote designs up and down, leave comments, and craft a great project vision.

"Crayon provides a delightful solution to a problem most marketers have, which is how to come up with great ideas," said Mike Volpe, CMO at HubSpot, who is also an advisor and investor in Crayon. "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."

About Crayon: Crayon is the new way for marketers to get inspired and get great ideas about what to build. It's the most comprehensive collection of real marketing designs on the web. For more information, visit http://www.Crayon.co.

SOURCE Crayon