Superside raises US$30 million from Prosus Ventures

Superside raises US$30 Million from Prosus Ventures and Lugard Road Capital

San Francisco –14 December, 2021— Superside, the fully-remote startup helping marketing and creative teams at ambitious companies get quality design work at scale, today announced a US$30 million Series A funding round co-led by Prosus Ventures and Lugard Road Capital, along with existing investors Slack Fund and Acequia Capital. In addition to the funding round, Superside also announced that Mats Diedrichsen, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Delivery Hero will be joining as a board member, and Sandeep Bakshi from Prosus Ventures will be joining the board as an observer.

Superside provides creative and design services to ambitious brands, enabling fast turnaround, high-quality design, at scale. Through its unique subscription model, Superside connects companies with a dedicated team of vetted designers and project managers to provide quality design work, faster and more cost-effective than traditional creative agencies and at a far superior quality than freelance marketplaces. Companies are offered subscription pricing plans to ensure project flexibility, along with a range of capabilities - from illustration and motion design to UI design and creative concepting and can kickstart their projects in a matter of hours.

“We have spent the last few years building a company with the top creatives from over 50 countries,” said Fredrik Thomassen, Superside’s Cofounder and CEO. “Our creative team members are highly skilled, award-winning, proven designers and creatives in their local markets and are now doing amazing work with our customers globally. In return, our customers get access to the world’s best creative talent, with a diverse and truly global take on the brand, creative and design across a number of disciplines. In a world where brands are vying for real distinction, we are providing an innovative approach that is desperately needed.”

The global adoption of digital marketing has resulted in an explosion of digital content. Spending on digital marketing is expected to reach $455 billion in 2021 with 30-60% going towards content. The portion spent on content creation will continue to rise as spending shifts further to social media platforms. Thus, there is a greater need for rapid, high-quality content creation, which has become a major bottleneck impacting an organisation’s ability to scale.

“What sets Superside apart from all the other players in the creative economy is their long-term approach to solving the underlying problems of marketing and creative teams,” summarises Mats Diedrichsen, former CMO of Delivery Hero. “I have joined their board because I believe Superside has the potential to become the ‘agency-killer’ while truly levelling the playing field for creatives all over the world.”

Superside has seen significant growth in the last few years, working with reputable brands, including Amazon, Salesforce and Cisco, who have consistently praised Superside’s fast turnaround times, creative diversity, high-quality content, and impressive access to global top talent.

Long-time customer Amir Jaffari, Growth lead at Shopify summarised: “Superside makes it easy for Shopify's Growth team to get the design done quickly without impacting the quality. Their platform is intuitive and enables speed, and the dedicated team model ensures everyone thoroughly understands our brand and day-to-day needs, allowing for scale.”

Superside will use the new funding to scale its product and tech teams to build additional features, as well as to attract more of the leading creatives across the globe. The company also has plans to hire close to a hundred engineers in the next 12 months to further build out its design operations platform.

Sandeep Bakshi, Head of European Investments, Prosus Ventures adds:

“As the need for high-quality, fast-turnaround digital content continues to rise, and companies look for increasing brand distinction, Superside is fulfilling the demand by offering a unique subscription that provides fast, flexible and diverse design from some of the world’s top creative talent. In addition, as the pandemic has accelerated the momentum of flexible and independent work, Superside is highly attractive for creative team members, offering remote, flexible, and high paying jobs, allowing them to work with top brands globally. We believe Superside can usher in a new era of creative solutions for top companies globally, and are excited to partner with them on this vision.”

About Superside

Trusted by fast-growing ambitious brands, Superside makes design hassle-free for marketing and creative teams, by combining the top 1% of creative talent from around the world with purpose-built technology and the rigor of design ops. Superside was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 class and has seen significant traction since inception. The company is fully distributed, with almost 500 team members working across 57 countries and 19 time zones.