Superside Raises $30M to Build World’s Largest Creative Company and Replace Traditional Agencies
Our mission at Superside is to create more equal opportunities globally. We’re doing it by democratizing access to the world’s best design talent at scale within the modern enterprise.
To that end, we’re excited to announce we’ve raised US$30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Prosus Ventures and Lugard Road Capital, who are joining our existing investors Slack Fund and Acequia Capital.
Here’s what that means for the future of Superside and our customers👇
The Opportunity Ahead: Connecting World-Class Companies with Truly World-Class Design Teams
Superside has been a 100% remote company since its inception at Y Combinator in 2016. Today, we have over 500 team members distributed across 57 countries and 19 time zones around the world, and are trusted by 400+ fast-growing companies including global brands like Coinbase, Facebook, Salesforce, Puma, and Shopify.
“Our creative team members are highly skilled, award-winning talent. They are proven designers and creatives in their home markets who are now able to compete for opportunity on the global creative stage,” says Fredrik Thomassen. “We’re connecting ambitious companies with world-class creative talent, giving them a diverse and truly global take on brand, creative, and design across a number of disciplines.”
And we’re just getting started.
The next chapter for Superside’s growth will be informed by three major trends we’ve seen across our industry:
- Demand for fresh creative is outpacing production capacity. Digital marketing spend is expected to reach $524.31 billion in 2022, with more of it shifting to high-quality, high-volume creative production to compete on social media. Companies need more creative bandwidth, and freelance marketplaces and big agencies built for the TV era just aren’t fast or cost-efficient enough. The result is a bottleneck that impacts an organization’s ability to execute.
- The internet has made talent about merit, not proximity to the office. Remote work has leveled the playing field to give the best creative talent around the world more access to opportunity, particularly in emerging markets. The fight for top talent has never been more fierce, especially in North America, and forward-thinking companies are taking a global online approach in order to compete.
- Creativity scales through technology, process, and automation. Adding headcount or outsourcing to an agency won’t solve design bottlenecks in fast-moving organizations. It will take a combination of specialized talent, strategic design operations, and tech-enabled collaboration to reach the speed and scale required by today’s enterprise.
That’s why we’ve built Superside as a faster, scalable alternative to the traditional agency—a fully-managed subscription service that leverages our remote working model—giving the entire organization access to an always-on design team. Our collaboration platform saves everyone time by enabling everything from briefing, project management, design feedback, and asset delivery to happen in a single place.
Mats Diedrichsen, the former CMO of Delivery Hero, summed it up well when he recently joined our board: “I believe Superside has the potential to become the ‘agency-killer’ while truly leveling the playing field for creatives all over the world.”
Building the Future of DesignOps by Investing in Talent and Technology
We already scout the best creative talent in local markets around the world with a rigorous-but-fair vetting process.
We’re doubling down on our bet on great people to recruit more world-class creatives to add more capacity and new design capabilities. We’re building first-rate design education into our training to help Supersiders take their creative talents to the next level. In fact, we’ve just launched our own “design academy” called Airstart with our first cohort graduating in 2022.
If you’re an ambitious creative, regardless of your geographic location, Superside is committed to being the fastest way to accelerate your career 🚀
After working as a Graphic Designer in some of the best advertising agencies, I currently work as a Senior Designer at Superside. Working at Superside has allowed me to work with incredible colleagues and professionals worldwide, make new friends, share many ideas and work for amazing customers!
— Natalia Romero, Sr. Designer (Bogota, Colombia)
If you are an attentive person, there is room for learning and development, and I love the fact that it is a people-centric organization (That means they value each Supersider's effort in achieving the most outstanding result).
—Timi Alonge, Sr. Designer (Accra, Ghana)
We’re also investing heavily in our product, hiring over 100 engineers and UXers in 2022, to expand upon the efficiencies created by our DesignOps technology.
It's our unique approach to combining talent and tech that our customers love about using Superside.
“As a new, fast-growing company, we were looking for ways to increase our team’s design capabilities that met the diversity of our creative needs while delivering campaigns and projects on time and on budget,” says Miranda Gottlieb, VP of Marketing at Curative. “Superside came in as our design partner and has not only elevated our brand through design and strategy, but also brought efficiency and scale to our process.”
To the 400+ Amazing Companies on this Journey With Us...
We wouldn’t be where we are today without our longtime supporters and Superside customers. We want to express our heartfelt thanks and tease some of what’s to come.
In 2022 and beyond, you can expect a number of big surprises from us, including:
- New design capabilities and formats, such as 3D modeling for AR/VR and video content creation
- Access to more involved support from your Superside team, including campaign strategy and ideation
- New in-platform features, such as a campaign planner and file annotations
- A broader range of subscription plans catering to specific use cases and team needs
- And more 🤫 😉
Follow along on Twitter, Instagram, and our blog to stay up-to-date as we build the next phase of Superside. Or, if you’re interested in learning more about Superside, book a call to talk about how we can eliminate design bottlenecks at your organization.
Built to be an extension of in-house teams, we deliver fast, scalable, world-class design and creative solutions to over 450 globally renowned companies such as Amazon, Meta, Salesforce and Google. Connect with us on LinkedIn.
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