The story of online collaborative office software continues.
Recently, Pixso completed nearly 100 million yuan pre-A round of financing, led by CICC Xinzhi, baidu venture capital and Yonghua investment joint investment, the funds will be used to increase product research and development investment.
Probably most people are a little unfamiliar with Pixso, but the mention of Wondershare Technology, which is listed on the A-share market, should be slightly heard. Pixso is a collaborative design tool that integrates UI design, prototyping, and delivery development incubated by Wondershare Technology. At present, Pixso has opened up the whole process link of product, design and research and development, and is also the first product in China to implement new graphic algorithms such as vector grids.
It is worth mentioning that due to historical development reasons, design software has previously occupied a dominant position for overseas companies. Taking industrial software as an example, according to the data of the China Industrial Technology Software Industry Alliance, the localization rate of R&D and design industrial software in mainland China in 2019 is only 5%, and 95% of R&D and design industrial software depends on imports.
However, in recent years, with the rapid expansion of the domestic market demand for design market, it has catalyzed the growth process of domestic industrial software.
According to the statistics of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, in 2021, China achieved a software business increase of 17.7% year-on-year, reaching the highest growth rate of software business revenue growth in 7 years, which also means that the development of online software can not be ignored.
The development of domestic industrial software is not alone, after the pioneer enterprises represented by MasterGo launched the "domestic design software co-creation plan", there have been more and more head enterprises in different industries in the queue to join, which shows that the trend of domestic substitution has become more and more obvious.
This may also be one of the reasons why capital has increased the online design industry. Looking back at Pixso, why can it be favored by capital as a new force for design collaboration that has recently emerged?
"Pixso" ambitions are revealed
In the past two years, with the impact of the epidemic, people's office methods have also quietly changed, the boundaries between "home" and "office" have begun to blur, and everyone has become an information island after leaving the offline office scene, how to connect these "islands" and become the common needs of enterprises, which also provides fertile ground for the growth of collaborative office.
Source: China Commercial Industry Research Institute
According to CNNIC data, as of December 2020, the scale of collaborative office users in the mainland reached 346 million, an increase of 147 million over June 2020, accounting for 34.9% of the total number of Netizens. As of the first half of 2021, the scale of collaborative office users in the mainland will reach 380 million.
Collaborative office is gradually becoming a trend, and collaborative office-related products are also showing a scene of hundreds of controversies.
For a time, SaaS tools such as online documents and video conferencing mushroomed, and DingTalk, enterprise WeChat, Tencent Conference, Zoom, etc. all showed good growth.
Among them, another type of tool product, design collaboration, has also become a flashpoint SaaS tool developed by the design industry under the epidemic. One of the most well-known is Figma.
Figma was officially launched in September 2016, as an online prototyping design tool, Figma has been favored by more and more designer teams since its birth, and has grown into a mainstream design tool, and the user scale even exceeds the scale of design tools such as Sketch.
According to UX Tools statistics, Figma's global usage rate has reached 77% in 2021, far behind other similar software. In the UXtools 2021 Design Tools List, Figma also ranked first in terms of usage and ratings.
In contrast, domestic design collaboration software has also emerged in recent years with a number of leaders: the real-time design of Xueyun Ruichuang Technology, the MasterGo of Blue Lake, and the Pixso launched by Wondershare Technology, which has completed nearly 100 million yuan of financing.
Among them, Pixso is a dark horse that has run out in recent years.
In November 2021, Wondershare incubated Pixso against Figma, which is also the first incubation project of Wondershare to operate independently as a company, with the intention of further preempting the design collaboration market.
At the beginning of its establishment, the Pixso team found in the survey that the demand of the UI designer community alone is large enough.
According to public data, in the field of UI design alone, there are nearly 20 million vertical customers in the world, while the size of China's UI designer group is at least more than 3 million, and the related production and research groups that work closely with design are tens of millions. In the face of a growing user base, UI design tools are thriving.
At the same time, with the gradual maturity of the Internet industry, this also provides a new direction for product development, and Pixso, backed by Wondershare Technology, has caught up with a better time at this time.
First, the software programs of the past can no longer adapt to the requirements of users.
Taking Sketch as an example, Sketch has won praise from many designers for its efficient drawing speed. But after 2020, because of the epidemic, all workers must adapt to the status quo of isolated work from home. Sketch, which used to be a good user experience, did not support the ability to work remotely, and also prompted designers to consider finding new production tools.
Second, with the gradual expansion of the technical field, the humanization awareness of product production is increasing, and more and more enterprises have begun to pay attention to the investment in interaction design and user testing. For example, many APP platforms such as NetEase Cloud Music and QQ need to bring more vivid dynamic design through continuous updating of versions in order to meet the ever-changing aesthetic tastes of users.
On the whole, technological innovation and changes in designer needs have undoubtedly accelerated the iteration speed of the industry. With the increase in iteration speed, software homogenization has become more and more obvious, from this point of view, Pixso's launch of innovative products is conducive to opening up new gaps in design collaboration, and there are opportunities to achieve curve overtaking.
In fact, as an ecological member of Wondershare Technology, Pixso has a strong strength in product innovation. Wondershare Technology has launched a number of tens of millions of products such as Edraw, inkjet, etc., so it has rich experience in integrated product design collaboration platform products.
At present, the innovation of Pixso products is that as long as there is a screen and networking, it can be stored out of the box, and it can be used without the restrictions of the operating system, usage scenarios or office space, and multiple people can collaborate online in real time.
In summary, Pixso benchmarked Figma at the beginning of the design, and its ambition to occupy the domestic market has entered the open brand stage.
Pixso has cracked the software containment
In recent years, the domestic collaborative design software market has also surged.
In October 2021, Blue Lake announced the completion of a 1 billion yuan C+ round of financing, becoming a new unicorn in China's cloud software track, at the press conference, Blue Lagoon announced the official launch of a one-stop product design tool MasterGo, and said that it was permanently free to individuals and the education industry, officially opening the era of design collaboration; in October 2021, "instant design" received two rounds of tens of millions of dollars in financing Hillhouse, SIG and other investments.
The rapid influx of capital seems to indicate that the domestic online design collaboration industry has hidden a huge market growth point.
The reason behind this may be the rapid changes in the international situation, the frequent occurrence of unexpected events that catch enterprise users off guard, and the localization of software may become a new trend.
Recently, figma in the United States suspended DJI accounts, triggering an "earthquake" in the domestic software circle.
For companies such as DJI, this software containment will not only lead to the interruption of normal work, but also may face the risk of loss of design data and data, and even confidential leakage.
At present, many major Internet companies such as Byte, Tencent, Ali, huawei, etc. are using Figma's products, so after the outbreak of the incident, for a while, everyone is in danger.
Subsequently, some domestic enterprises urgently carried out data migration, transferring the data originally archived in Figma to the domestic design software platform, and many individual designers also chose to back up the design data stored in Figma on the domestic design software platform.
In this regard, the domestic design software platform Pixso, ink knife, MasterGo, timely design, etc. quickly followed up and launched the file transfer function. Among them, Pixso has launched the Figma file import function at the fastest speed; MasterGo has followed closely behind, and after MasterGo released the announcement of the launch of the "Figma file import function", the traffic on masterGo's official website soared more than 10 times than usual.
It can be seen that this incident is only a catalyst to promote the outbreak of domestic design software tracks, affected by external unstable factors, the use of localization software as a substitute has become the choice of many enterprises, and this may be the internal reason why investment institutions and science and technology innovation enterprises have bet on the outlet of online collaboration tracks.
In general, the competition pattern of domestic online design collaboration tracks has not yet been determined, and the market contains new opportunities and challenges.