Today, we are excited to announce our Series A investment in Penpot, a rapidly growing open-source design and prototyping platform loved by designers and developers in more than 10,000 companies around the world. Design tools have historically been controlled by proprietary vendors, using closed standards that create silos between designers, developers, and product teams. Penpot is a fundamental change in approach - an open-source and community-owned platform that breaks down traditional silos, enabling designers and engineers to seamlessly collaborate and create great user experiences.
Penpot was co-founded by Pablo Ruiz-Múzquiz, a longstanding open-source creator and contributor who set out to make the design process accessible to all. We asked him to share his vision for “creation to code” in our founder Q&A:
I was born in Madrid, Spain and my father worked at Telefonica, the largest telecom provider in Spain. We were very lucky - he was asked to participate in an early “work from home” pilot using the Internet and set up a computer in my bedroom with a dial-up modem. This was back in 1994 and I was just 13 years old - he told me not to touch it and I obviously couldn’t resist. I hacked into his account and discovered the Internet at all hours - coding and collaborating on IRC channels and contributing to open-source software projects. One day my father came home and took the computer out of my room - as it turns out, the management at Telefonica had discovered that our house had consumed 100x more bandwidth than any other home in the pilot! In retrospect, this moment changed my life - I was banned from using a computer for a year but had discovered a new community on the Internet and fell in love with computer science.
I was born in Madrid, Spain and my father worked at Telefonica, the largest telecom provider in Spain. We were very lucky - he was asked to participate in an early “work from home” pilot using the Internet and set up a computer in my bedroom with a dial-up modem. This was back in 1994 and I was just 13 years old - he told me not to touch it and I obviously couldn’t resist. I hacked into his account and discovered the Internet at all hours - coding and collaborating on IRC channels and contributing to open-source software projects. One day my father came home and took the computer out of my room - as it turns out, the management at Telefonica had discovered that our house had consumed 100x more bandwidth than any other home in the pilot! In retrospect, this moment changed my life - I was banned from using a computer for a year but had discovered a new community on the Internet and fell in love with computer science.
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I went to college to study physics - I was surprised to see that there were no online textbooks at the university level so I created the first ever open-source collection of textbooks called Alqua with two of my hacktivist friends (the manifesto can still be found here). There was no open-source license for textbooks back then; so, we came up with one. This was obviously not the “proper” way to share knowledge in a traditional school, and our school administrators tried to stop us from distributing freely what had previously only been accessible to those privileged enough to attend university. This didn’t seem fair - if the laws of thermodynamics applied to all, it felt like they should be shared with everyone. I saw that open source and open knowledge could free people from traditional hierarchies and allow everyone to collaborate across the world - this became a passion which ultimately led to the founding of Kaleidos and the creation of Penpot.